“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... life on the space station, for instance, are as serenely packed with philosophical suggestion as a Wallace Stevens poem: ‘the heart scraped hollow with craving, which is not emptiness in the least, more the knowledge of how fillable he is. The sights from orbit do this; they make a billowing kite of you, given shape and loftiness by all that you ...”