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“... intentions. The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas. The cure ...”

“... contradictions of his being most subtly and most dramatically. In The Double in Literature (1970) Robert Rogers pointed out that the young captain narrator ‘symbolically summoned his double’ by leaving a rope-ladder dangling over the side, as if in a tale by Hoffmann, whom Conrad mentions elsewhere, and that the story conjures up the contrasting sides of ...”

“... peer, Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the second Earl of Lytton; her late father was the poet and statesman Robert Bulwer-Lytton, who had been viceroy of India at the time of the Great Famine of 1876. This was her first stay in prison, and she had been looking forward to seeing how badly women were treated there: instead she was placed in the hospital wing, where she ...”

“... When​  Libra came out in 1988, the American writer Robert Towers said that it had made Don DeLillo the ‘chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction’. ‘Paranoid school’ doesn’t get you very far – Pynchon and Mailer, both broad-brush comparisons, were the other faculty members Towers had in mind – but there’s mileage in the notion of DeLillo as a shaman ...”

“... The difference between ‘selected’ and ‘collected’ poems, Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter in 1954, is that ‘people read selected poems but don’t buy them’ and ‘buy collected poems but don’t read them’. The symbolism of a collected volume worried him: ‘A book that contains everything that one has done in a lifetime does not reassure one ...”

“... properly) advised by his lawyers to settle for £5000. The barrister who advised him was Robert McCartney QC. Mr McCartney had recently won a celebrated libel action in Belfast against the Sunday World. The paper had alleged, falsely, that Mr McCartney and another barrister had had a row in a café over the last available cream bun. This report, the ...”

“... in drawing 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 ...”

“... was 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 ...”

“... Poetry pro that I hardly am, I feel that, and I guess Ian Hamilton does too. His biography of Robert Lowell came out in 1982 (at the time, I was half-seriously trying to write a PhD on him). Hamilton, as he writes in ‘A Biographer’s Misgivings’, the first piece in Walking Possession, knew his subject fairly well: ‘I had seen quite a lot of Lowell ...”

“... so 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 ...”

“... during the late 1980s and early 1990s played this role for tuberculosis, and Deborah and Rodrick Wallace recount some of them in their chapter in Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla’s book. Cutbacks in control programmes, reductions in treatment facilities, a decaying of the culture of infection control in institutions, the provision of giant ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, continuers.’ In a US review, Robert Coover suggested that computer hackers might make Dictionary of the Khazars their own as a prototype hypertext, unpaginated, non-sequential, that can be entered anywhere by anybody. This looks forward to a utopian, high-tech version of the oral tradition ...”

“... and with different timbres, this refrain has been part of the Joe McCarthy movement, the George Wallace campaign and every Republican surge from Nixon to Gingrich. (But let’s not be too partisan about it; the rhetoric evolved from the days when the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern Democratic Party were each other’s official and provisional wings.) As ...”

“... 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 ...”