“... and became the sacrificial muses who inspired his poetry.’ Lowell grew up revering T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound (‘I ask you to have me,’ he wrote to Pound as a college freshman), but in the 1950s, famous after the publication of the technically masterful Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946, he started to feel stultified by the modernism of ...”

“... reminded that his first book The Unmediated Vision (1954) was contemporary with the late poetry of Wallace Stevens and with such critical works as Erich Heller’s The Disinherited Mind: his alertness to critical fashions never removes him from a romantic tradition lamenting the disenchantment of the external world, and seeking restoration for this in the ...”

“... An earlier novel of Mr Moore’s, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, had made serious play with the Wallace Stevens poem, gravitating from the delicious chill to the coldness of death. But it is inheritance which makes allusion central and indispensable, since literary allusion is itself an act of inheritance. To use the wording of previous writers is to ...”

“... is a book full of echoes of other writers, Balzac, Blake, Sade, Baudelaire, Goethe, Mervyn Peake, Wallace Stevens and a host of forgotten describers of circuses, of Russia and of dear old smoky London, and for a while it seems lost in the throng. ‘Lor’ love you, sir,’ it opens in stage Cockney, introducing us to Fevvers, the famous winged lady ...”

“... it is not animism, or pathetic fallacy, but a magical instability. Roth writes as well as anyone (Wallace Stevens, say) about attractiveness: anyone who has read Weights and Measures will remember the effect on Lieutenant Eibenschütz of the tinkle of the gypsy Euphemia’s earrings; from the name Lutetia (in Confession of a Murderer) ‘there emanated a ...”

“... a friend of Adolph Gottlieb and of Milton Avery: there were poetry readings (the work of Eliot and Wallace Stevens was in favour). And so on through the Thirties – he joined a group (The Ten), exhibited, wrote (about children’s art, for instance). In 1938 he became a naturalised American. In 1939 his work appeared in an exhibition, The Ten: Whitney ...”

“... to Eastman by punching him out – as he would other male authors, including the mild-mannered Wallace Stevens, who had called him a ‘sap’, though not to his face. He would save his revenge on Stein for the printed page and a much later date, in the deftly poisonous account of a lesbian tiff between her and Toklas in A Moveable Feast. His parents ...”

“... different eras have been fond of rare words, as the recent examples of Mallarmé, T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens will suggest.) Finally, it does no justice whatever to the richness of this particular text to think, for example, of the transcendent meteorological and zoological panorama of the Voice from the Whirlwind as a ‘compendium list’. We shall ...”

“... with Shelley, and she finds among his successors Van Gogh (surprisingly but persuasively) and Wallace Stevens – the Stevens who wrote pentameters, in ‘Sunday Morning’. But this case for Browning rests on much later poems than those in these first two volumes. The young Browning was at his best when he was ...”

“... this. Stravinsky, too, from Petrushka on, developed a style based on repetition and variation, and Wallace Stevens quite consciously developed variation rather than sonata form, as Hockney sensed when he decided to make his own variations on Stevens’s variations on Picasso’s ‘Man with the Blue Guitar’. The ...”

“... notes towards the supreme fiction we are now living with. (I don’t believe Lippmann ever met Wallace Stevens, but I imagine they would have had a lot to say to each other. Stevens, his senior by ten years, thought that ‘reality is an activity of the most august imagination.’) ‘For Lippmann, the problem of ...”

“... and their sons; other tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and ...”

“... second edition of his book Very Little … Almost Nothing (1997), a study of Blanchot, Beckett and Wallace Stevens: Events circled around my father’s illness with lung cancer which resulted in his death a couple of days after Christmas 1994 … Very Little … Almost Nothing is thus an act of mourning. It is dedicated to my father, and my memory of his ...”

“... would meet Poirier’s version of the pragmatic test, but I do not think that Emerson (or Wallace Stevens) is ever so absolute a reductionist. Arguing with reductionists always seems to me both difficult and useless; the better argument goes on within the reductionists themselves. Poirier, sometimes very subtly, argues more with himself in Poetry ...”

“... the mock turtles have started to graze under the neutral fruit trees, like refugees from a poem by Wallace Stevens, there’s no contrast left between the organic and the inorganic. Even the something else has been made out of something else. Orwell’s hero is a lot funnier than the most famous gamekeeper in English literature, but his jeremiad descends ...”