“... pokes out from the end of a bizarrely corrugated thick stem in a manner that is definitely lewd. Wallace Stevens captured the look of it in a poem called ‘Floral Decoration for Bananas’, and I had no idea what he was describing until I saw it for myself: Fibrous and dangling down Oozing cantankerous gum Out of their purple maws, Darting out of ...”

“... are to Baudelaire and Nerval, but his work is often close to that of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Weinberger tells us that when he (correctly) identified a touch of Whitman in the title and rhythms of the poem ‘I Speak of the City’, Paz said: ‘No, I was thinking of Langston Hughes: The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’ This thought ...”

“... it has flourished so prodigally there. Frank Kermode once wrote that reading a certain poem by Wallace Stevens made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, a statement it would be as hard to imagine issuing from the lips of a young American professor in pursuit of tenure as it would be unthinkable in the writing of Georg Lukács. It is the kind ...”

“... Brown has contributed powerfully to its nurture. What his book lacks, I think, is the attention Wallace Stevens gave, in a melancholic late poem, to the ‘plain sense of things’. Stevens’s plain sense is the understanding arrived at after we have come to an ‘end of the imagination’: to a time when the things ...”

“... self-effacing pursuit of capital-I Imagination, after the models of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens and H.D., would cause her to be left behind as the age moved towards a model of political and feminist poetries. But her 500-page Collected Poems belongs among the achievements of 20th-century modernism, a sphere overlapping almost nowhere ...”

“... wheatLike memorial ribbons red among tubas.Painterly, suave yet éblouissant, these lines recall Wallace Stevens. ‘Deaf clatter’ summons up the first line of the first poem in Harmonium: ‘Every time the bucks went clattering.’ ‘Stupid glory’ echoes the ‘stupid afternoon’ in ‘Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores’. And the red rags and ...”

“... was published, the names of contributors included Pound, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. For 35 years Pound advised, instructed, cajoled, abused, while Laughlin for the most part acted on the good advice, ignored the bad, and behaved with a degree of patrician independence proper to a man who was able to wait ...”

“... pants and polo shirts and golf hats, old men at a pink hotel in a storm. The vision is half Wallace Stevens, half T.S. Eliot – ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ crossed with ‘Gerontion’. And it is entirely Didion to place such a poetic utterance – a paean to the dissolution of personality – in a work that poses as a political thriller, but ...”

“... confining his enthusiasms to co-Celts like Yeats and Mac-Diarmid and to the odd American, like Wallace Stevens. Thomas’s favourite Larkin poem, he says, is ‘Faith Healing’. (Larkin, of course, referred to Thomas as ‘Arse’ or ‘Arsewipe’. The two of them met once, and Thomas – said Larkin – ‘stood there without moving or speaking: he ...”

“... turning up late for class, or asking his students to rewrite a Wordsworth poem in the manner of Wallace Stevens, Koch was, by all accounts, an inspiring figure. In The Art of Love (1975), the class clown has settled in as teacher. The lengthy disquisitions ‘On Beauty’ and ‘The Art of Poetry’ are fairly sensible, if unsurprising ...”

“... of pedagogue to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry and criticism of Eliot in particular, and to a lesser extent of Pound, played a significant role in shaping the ...”

“... the world around us. Nobody is more sensitive than Ashbery to such accidents. Ashbery has followed Wallace Stevens in centring the poems on the flow of his thought, the Niagara-like rush and hum of his brain. But being less vain and more worldly than Stevens, he has mostly avoided narcissism – unless one imagines a ...”

“... will the weevil/Delay?’) and you realise how lame it is by comparison. I can almost imagine Wallace Stevens enjoying ‘The Aeolian Harp at the Surf Inn’: ‘Listen: Less a strain ideal/Than Ariel’s rendering of the Real’, but then I imagine Stevens switching off as Melville’s fleet-footed muse abandons ...”

“... have found Jill in a Soho bookstore, next to High-Heeled Yvonne. That would have delighted Keats.)Wallace Stevens said that ‘a poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.’ Stevens and Larkin are romantics of a very different colour – in any case what about those poets who are women? – but as regards both ...”

“... order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever.’ There is a cluster of poems by Wallace Stevens, mostly from the 1940s, that seems to me helpful. I think they were written with Cézanne in mind. ‘Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit’ is central, and especially the poem’s conviction that ‘It is the human that is the alien,/The ...”