“... as an adult. But in the mid-20th century he was the most popular poet in the United States after Robert Frost, and from early in his career, among the most admired by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very ...”

“... and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert Alter, and it has arrived accompanied by a joyful noise, widely acclaimed in the press as the Psalms for Our Time. New translations of a classic text are either done as a criticism of the old translations (correcting mistakes, finding an equivalent that is ...”

“... coy attention to its nonsensicality. The watchword of such verse should be a line from Wallace Stevens: ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.’ The strange relation is inevitable to poetry, and to its supreme fiction, but to pursue it consciously is to achieve tedium, as Joyce does in Finnegans Wake. ‘Any poet is a zaumnik, whether he ...”

“... centred on London. Well, not all: Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (like Pound and his protégés, an early contributor to Poetry, Chicago) stayed behind; so did the group of young painters and photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly Camera Work. Besides, it was always possible to import whole ...”

“... There are some notable recent success stories, from Newt Gingrich, with a PhD in history, to Robert Preston, an English ABD (all but dissertation) whose latest non-fiction book, The Hot Zone, is a bestseller. In bad times, the MLA has provided expert advice on non-academic employment. But the graduate programmes themselves have continued to reproduce ...”

“... much but was unable to construct a fully formed, readable dramatic character: because, as Wallace Stevens said, ‘no one is ever simply himself but is always compounded of other people.’ For Beddoes the self was a graveyard, and his own was cluttered with the bodies of Keats and Shelley, Marlowe and Webster. Writing tragic drama legitimised his desire to ...”

“... his saying to me as he folded the Times with some disgust, “Frenchmen. Really. I mean to say, Stevens. Frenchmen.” “Yes, sir.” “And to think we have to be seen by the world to be arm in arm with them. One wishes for a good bath at the mere reminder.” “Yes, sir.”’ A similar exchange might easily have taken place at Mount Stewart. You did ...”

“... Robert Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit. Quotations from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945: ‘Suppose a thousand suns should rise together into the sky: such is the glory of the Shape of the Infinite God.’ Reading that same chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Darjeeling in 1962, Allen Ginsberg thought of something else: the coloured wheels of psilocybin-induced visions ...”

“... décor and its tendency to metonymise and otherwise play the figures of speech. Like Wallace Stevens, whom she much admired, she made jokes, and even more than in Stevens’s case, the jokes were sly, hardly perceptible, there for her own pleasure. Yet for all the ironies, visible and invisible, some of the poems even ...”

“... homosexual rape carried out by an older man – specifically, a domineering uncle-guardian named Robert Manning, whose bed and board were shared by the fledgling author before he left for Bowdoin College. (Manning also happened to be, for those who might want to make something of it, the most renowned pomologist in the United States.) For ...”

“... days after his 25th birthday), amassing for full-page promotional ads approving quotes from Tate, Stevens, MacNeice, R.P. Blackmur, Ransom, Philip Rahv, Auden, Mark Van Doren, Philip Wheelwright and Dudley Fitts. The ‘American Auden’ label that was to haunt him later in life as the most damning evidence of his unfulfilled promise was in fact part of the ...”

“... would later be included in his Yale Younger Poets collection, Some Trees. He wrote a send-up of Robert Lowell, whose poetry he couldn’t stand: ‘Mudgulping trawler, Truro in the ooze/Past Peach’s Point, with tray of copper spoons/For Salem’s Mayor Caldecott to suck,/ For his doll’s calico corpse, red-needled in the book’. He discovered Wallace ...”

“... It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976 ...”

“... not imminent appearance of a poet for whom none of all that held any magnetism. A new Auden, a new Stevens might have seemed to be the answer, and shortly there were indeed new Audens, new Stevenses to choose from. But neither intellectualism nor playfulness nor mere perfection of technique would be enough to reclaim glamour for the impersonal, or ...”

“... table in the main dining-room where Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger are sitting (not eating, no dinner has arrived, no dinner will arrive), the pale linen curtains in the main dining-room blowing out, the rain on the parquet floor, the isolation, the excitement, the tropical storm. In a ...”