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“... many devoted friends at Harvard (as Millier notes), ranging from Octavio Paz to William Alfred and Robert Fitzgerald, and in her writing courses found students whom she admired and liked, both male and female. She also found a new person to love, Alice Methfessel, the administrative assistant at Kirkland House (the student residence where Bishop was first ...”

“... to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic. Now Merrill is available to the English in a slim volume of his best work, selected by him shortly before his death in 1995. Merrill was far from ...”

“... very brief text does not discuss paintings of Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign at all. MaryAnne Stevens does briefly discuss the three Egyptian paintings by Gros and notes that they were commissioned as propaganda, that Gros had not been to Egypt and that he ‘conjured up an exotic world of brilliant colour, dramatic turmoil and unfamiliar settings, which ...”

“... 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 dress, she said, and ...”

“... the sleazy stories about bonking bimbos achieved a dominant influence in the circulation charts. Robert Maxwell, who bought the Mirror in 1984, did not attempt to reverse the vulgarisation process; when he was not rifling the pension fund he seemed to be chiefly interested in getting a picture of himself in every issue. But in the last few years, under ...”

“... If Robert Lowell had not been a Lowell would he ever have had the confidence to write the poems he did? It is impossible to imagine the scion of a distinguished English family using that family now as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by Weldon Kees’, ‘Variations on a Theme from James’, ‘After a Phrase Abandoned by Wallace Stevens’, ‘Variations on a Text by Vallejo’, ‘A Variation on Baudelaire’s “La Servante au grand coeur”’. ‘American Scenes (1904-1905)’ is quarried almost entirely from Henry James’s account of his return to his homeland and the notebook ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the First World War, London still beckoned aspiring American poets. Ezra Pound arrived in 1908, Robert Frost in 1912, and T.S. Eliot in 1914. When Pound arrived he was only 23, Eliot was 26, but Frost was almost 39. He had been writing poetry, most of it unpublished, for some twenty years, and the difference in style was striking. Set beside the early work ...”

“... more crazy if we were to have more casualties on our side to save the Japanese. This is quoted in Robert Kee’s 1945 – The World We Fought For. Kee’s method is to construct an account of the year from contemporary newspapers and journals. Its vice is that it can look rather lazily tacked together. Its virtue is that it helps us to see events as the ...”

“... a predecessor. Nevertheless, to speak of the present Lord Rothermere – or, worse, of Sir Jocelyn Stevens or the late Lord (‘Whelks’) Matthews – in the same tone of voice as Beaverbrook is a substantial affront to natural justice. Fortunately, Griffiths is more generous to the other main agent in the building up of the modern Evening Standard. Charles ...”

“... are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners. This is the main stream of modern American poetry. In England the picture is very different. Pound is grudgingly acknowledged, distrusted, kept at a distance. Eliot holds his place, but not the revolutionary Eliot. Eliot didn’t convert ...”

“... big violet streak of Original Swinburne-with-a-dead-baby’ or dubbed the philosophical Stevens a ‘G.E. Moore at the spinet’, he took it for granted that his arrows would strike home, that there was an audience out there that knew how to echo his own chuckles. In much the same way Jarrell rarely felt the need to labour his recommendations, or to ...”

“... as surrealist. The patrons of Max Ernst and Buñuel, the de Noailles, commissioned a terrace from Robert Mallet-Stevens with rectangular windows in the surrounding wall framing ‘scenes’ in the landscape. These look the Picturesque round the last bend to its illogical conclusion. The natural landscape was now a series of ...”