“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Virginia Woolf, from whose short story the book takes its title, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. Each eminence gets a chapter, which charts in monographic fashion the development of his or her reflections on objects and objectivity. The field of study is thus not the play of discourses or the political unconscious, but the literary ...”

“... a classic, i.e. secular, by sustaining itself within and against readerly appropriation. As Wallace Stevens declared in ‘Notes towards a Supreme Fiction’: It must be ...”

“... 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 Art of Telling; History and Value; An Appetite for Poetry and books on D.H. Lawrence and on Wallace Stevens. He retired from his Cambridge chair in 1982; was knighted in 1991. Not Entitled takes us through a grim but not unhappy childhood in Douglas (‘It as a world in which everybody was more or less ill. Heart, stomach, nerves were the ground ...”

“... Marcel, I Love You Like Hell, Marcel.’) She disgusted William Carlos Williams; she terrified Wallace Stevens. She wore cancelled postage stamps on her cheeks as beauty spots, and dressed in outfits one would think Barnes had invented had they not been confirmed by other people’s accounts (Herring is very good on this). Her hair was sometimes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”