“... 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 ...”

“... Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some ...”

“... equivalent offered here may sound like a turn of phrase one might encounter in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, but it offers a good semantic match for the Hebrew.’ (The Hebrew had merely put together two words that both mean ‘honey’.) St Hilary said that the Book of Psalms is a heap of keys that can open every door in a great city, but that it ...”

“... as to make them seem belated and himself their ever-early if sacrificial replacement’. Wallace Stevens, whom I have always read as a poet of light and of things emerging surprisingly from sound and from the air around him, is ‘a spirit so full of itself that there is room for nothing else’. Robert Frost ‘(in this like Whitman himself) is ...”

“... poem ‘The Idea of Entropy at Maenporth Beach’ is dedicated to Layard. The title alludes to Wallace Stevens, but as the poem rejoices in enveloping a woman in ‘fat, juicy, incredibly tart muck’, never has Stevens been led in such a strange direction. Slowly she slipped into the muck. It was a white ...”

“... and nursery 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 ...”

“... to so many of the best minds of his times and so many of its most gifted poets, including Pound, Wallace Stevens and Robert Lowell. Santayana was important because he really did understand the modern age; he was no stick-in-the-mud traditionalist. He read Freud and Faulkner and Lowell with zest and perception. He was a philosopher whose work and whose ...”

“... found himself torn between Frankfurt’s endemic miserabilism and what in Esthétique du Mal Wallace Stevens called the ‘passion for yes that had never been broken’. This has to prevail against the modish view of technology as behemoth. As Norman Stone once wrote of Speer, ‘beyond a certain level, technical matters cannot be separated from ...”

“... cursory in its treatment of Eliot’s literary background: there is no mention, for instance, of Wallace Stevens, Ivy Compton-Burnett, of Empson or Leavis, and no adequate picture of what Eliot meant to later generations of intellectuals in Britain. In other respects, however, this is a cogent and sensible account (which was constrained by a barbarous ...”

“... books to James, Hardy, Meredith and Trollope. It isn’t that there haven’t been other subjects; Wallace Stevens, in particular, recurs in all Miller’s work, and he has also written about various writers of the post-Victorian century, including philosophers and critics. But 19th-century authors have continued, through every other change, to provide ...”

“... final masterpiece, Requiem Canticles (1966), which has the wintry radiance of late poems by Wallace Stevens – owe their existence to a significant extent to the presence of Craft, as Walsh repeatedly makes clear. His role as intellectual catalyst, encourager and amanuensis was as indispensable as it is exceptional in musical history. It was ...”

“... breaches the limits of every attempt to contain them conceptually or aesthetically; or in Wallace Stevens, in his plum that ‘survives its poems’, oozing and rotting beyond and between their lines; in visual art, you see it in the thick, muddy canvases of Dubuffet, where materiality far overtakes mimesis; or, later, in the unformed mounds of ...”

“... the strain of his wide coverage is no doubt partly responsible for some strange omissions (with Wallace Stevens the most notable). Stapleton in his own Preface ingenuously tells us of his ‘enthusiasm and abiding love of the subject’, and adds that ‘a guide who never makes a comment makes a dull companion.’ He makes a great many, and since they ...”

“... the bare trees, the police sergeant’s wife, ‘grocers or taxidrivers/white and coloured’. Wallace Stevens (an acquaintance and admirer) explained in his perceptive preface to Williams’s 1931 Collected that his procedures joined ‘the sentimental and the anti-poetic’. Other reviewers picked up Stevens’s ...”