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“... I remember the pleasure of my first reading of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems when it came out in 1964 in a City Lights edition uniform (except that it was blue and red, not black and white) with Ginsberg’s Howl, Kaddish and Reality Sandwiches. Two years later O’Hara was dead, killed by a dune buggy at an all-night party on Fire Island. There was something Keatsian about his poetry, its vividness and particularity, and its spontaneity, though there might be difficulties for a critic who wanted to argue, as Matthew Arnold did when he tried to rescue Keats from the aesthetes, that ‘there was flint and iron in him ...”

“... home is a nuisance, a publicity plot, a cabal; and please don’t track the carpet. A letter to Donald Allen in September 1959 lists his influences, and those of his New York pals. These include Auden (‘though if Auden doesn’t drop the word numinous pretty soon, I shall squawk’), Pound, Eliot and Marianne Moore (but ‘after a bout of syllable ...”

“... when his enormous posthumous Collected won America’s National Book Award for 1971; its editor, Donald Allen, has since brought out a Selected and several more volumes of prose and verse. During the 1950s, O’Hara reviewed art and contemporary classical music. He wrote at least seven poems called ‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday’, and many others in ...”

“... glances in the direction of social orthodoxy made by the younger English novelists. The heroes of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, ‘destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix’ positively bounced with energy when put beside Donald Davie ...”

“... fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit.’ And Donald Davie, who everywhere has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a tradition of high-flying speculation about literature, which we costive islanders cannot afford not to profit ...”

“... The first poem by Donald Justice I ever read was the much anthologised sestina, ‘Here in Katmandu’: We have climbed the mountain, There’s nothing more to do ... It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, a beautiful and mysterious object, resonant and yet resistant to paraphrase. It might be said that it is a poem of regret for the death of idealism, a poem about coming to terms with quotidian reality, and, therefore, in some sense about ‘the way we live now ...”

“... from the enormous collection of Hesse’s works and papers (some 1500 items) housed at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio. Hesse wasn’t educated at Oberlin, but at Yale: it was her elder sister, Helen, who chose Oberlin for reasons that, many years later, seem both savvy and poignant. She wanted the collection to mark Hesse’s ...”

“... When Allen Tate died in 1979, Simon and Schuster speedily commissioned a biography, to be written, they announced, by Ned O’Gorman, a poet of some reputation and a friend of two of Tate’s three wives. O’Gorman, it would seem, got going in the usual way, writing to all the obvious Tate contacts and attempting to interview key intimates ...”

“... variety of claimants. A list of poets who have profited from his achievement would include Allen Ginsberg and Louis Zukofsky (both Jewish), the Lowell of Notebook, the Orientally-minded Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder on whom Cathay made such an impact, British poets as different from each other as Donald Davie and ...”

“... to have wanted to create a monumental art – in this following one of his American masters, Allen Tate, and disregarding another, John Crowe Ransom, who eschewed the monumental as consistently as Tate strained after it. (In The Lords of Limit there is an essay on Ransom which argues in the end – in the end only, for the drift is hard to discern and ...”

“... Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen began in a small and intensely lucid voice. At some point Jack Kerouac began shouting ‘GO’ in cadence as ...”

“... In 1949 when a panel of his fellow poets (including T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden and Allen Tate) awarded Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos there was an immediate and angry public debate. The reaction is not surprising and might have been worse had the texts of Pound’s wartime broadcasts over Rome Radio been publicly available ...”

“... the future.’ Others remind you that the dystopian world has its pleasures. On the page facing Allen Jones’s Archway (a sculpture in the Heathrow Hilton, Ballard’s favourite London building), you read that ‘sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one could never fall in love, or ...”

“... them the departments of psychiatry in the medical schools. How this was effected is the subject of Donald Light’s book. Light is a medical sociologist who sets out to examine ‘what kinds of people choose to become psychiatrists, how their training experience alters their sense of illness, treatment and responsibility, how they cope with suicidal ...”

“... said’. Like time, it collaborates only with silence, always invoked in Larkin’s poetic medium. Donald Davie has an expressive metaphor for the other kind of poetry, in a poem aptly entitled ‘Ars Poetica’: Walk quietly around in A space cleared for the purpose. Most poems, or the best, Describe their own birth, and this Is what they are – a space ...”