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“... Literature is to establish what, or rather who, he has modified: among poets, Whitman, Frost and Stevens; among critics and theorists, John Hollander, Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, George Kateb, Richard Rorty and Sacvan Bercovitch. Strong claims are made for the validity of the Emersonian position – it represents ‘what ...”

“... among them grovelling pro-Americanism, exemplified by leaders that might have been produced by George W. Bush’s press secretary; sneering anti-Europeanism, which pervades everything from the news pages at the front to the City pages at the back; and supine loyalty to any Tory leader, just as long as he is a right-of-centre chauvinist. And then there is ...”

“... working on it, will not quite destroy it; it makes the visible a little hard to see, as Wallace Stevens, early admired by Fuller, once remarked. Or, in another favourite Fuller locution, it ought to be not unimplicit, which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be clear. I particularly like a poem in Buff, the volume of 1965, about a little girl:  there’s a ...”

“... Aloof with rolling eye’; he didn’t like the neologistic epithet ‘penis’, partly because George Barker had used it first, partly because penises can only with difficulty be imagined to have ‘rolling’ eyes. ‘What the lighthouse was more like (the one at Dungeness) was a vinegar bottle with a perforated ceramic attachment to its cork, enabling ...”

“... in the hands of a mere five people. Indeed, with only three people – Maxwell, Murdoch and Stevens – controlling 80 per cent of it. We might well ask whether we have not simply returned full circle to a 1694 triple pre-censorship. The implications for broadcasting were ominous. Worse was to come. Peacock, for all his Adam Smith convictions, had ...”

“... The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas. The cure ...”

“... canonisation came after those of Charles Brockden Brown, H.P. Lovecraft, James Weldon Johnson, George Kaufman, William Bartram and Theodore Roosevelt. He might not have been too chuffed about that. I am an abject fan of the Library. I own, I find, ten of its volumes: three of Parkman, one each of Henry James, Adams, Baldwin, Frost and ...”

“... around us. Nobody is more sensitive than Ashbery to such accidents. Ashbery has followed Wallace Stevens in centring the poems on the flow of his thought, the Niagara-like rush and hum of his brain. But being less vain and more worldly than Stevens, he has mostly avoided narcissism – unless one imagines a Narcissus whose ...”

“... he wrote, and in the breast of every admirer. Invoking Milton’s Satan, or Napoleon, or George III (in a long and elaborate poem), Lowell does not so much identify with those persons as cause them to appear in a new light as Robert Lowell. Who else could they be? What else could the poets and poems taken over in Imitations be? It is significant that ...”

“... America for its behaviour in Vietnam could have implications for sterling. On 16 June 1965, John Stevens of the British Embassy in Washington wrote that ‘the administration still do not think that a devaluation of sterling would bring down the US dollar but this attitude may change as their hopes of strengthening the US balance of payments are dashed. I ...”

“... briefly by an unregarded few. And so it comes about that the Victorians – Browning, no less than George Eliot – are back in favour, not just for their undemanding and verbally profligate forms but for their portentous preoccupation: how to lose religious faith and yet preserve all the psychological comforts which that faith had afforded. More than a ...”

“... genteel, but by the time that was clear the Great War had started, so nobody blamed Uncle George. ‘Today there are no Hemingways left in Oak Park, but there are plenty of squirrels.’ So, in summary, runs the ominously leisurely opening paragraph, and it is followed by much more significant detail about crime-free Oak Park, the nobs’ refuge from ...”

“... an XI in which every position is taken by a Gary. I will start you off. Gary Bailey in goal. Gary Stevens right back. Now you carry on.’ Yes, truly boring. But in those days soccer-mania was dark and lonely work. Outside my small circle of co-bores, most people I knew just didn’t want to know. From time to time, I’d cut a prole-ish dash in pubs or quell ...”

“... of reading the interview, to congratulate ‘ma Baudelairienne actuelle’ on the central picture, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold, which he said he longed to see again. He was too late, however. Mitchell was already back at her studio in Paris.As a young painter she had been part of the New York art scene of the late 1940s; she was a ...”

“... dragoons his friends into madcap adventures alongside Mayakovsky, Rachmaninov, Polly Peachum and George Washington. They’re all mixing it in his imagination, with varying levels of decorum: ‘Yippee! she is shooting in the harbour! he is jumping/up to the maelstrom!’ ‘Such pimples! such hard-ons! such moody loves.’He was a writer of birthday ...”