*
December 2024
Oscar Wilde’s letter describes the demolishing of Jesse James’s house (a quarter-mile from Wilde’s hotel) by souvenir-hunters a week after James’s murder.
September 2024
Wallace Stevens appears to be quoting another source with this reference to “the dire delight…of men who are lacking in sense.” But the original source is apparently exceedingly obscure. I inquired of The Wallace Stevens Society to see if anyone there knew the source; it turned out that no one did (and French members of the Society were unable to find an equivalent statement in French). I’m told there’s a possibility that Stevens made up this “quote” — something he apparently did in later life in prose and poems, to compensate (out of self-consciousness) for his lack of academic credentials, especially when asked to write reviews and scholarly articles. (He was an insurance executive.)
A chronology of continued square roots
“The theory of continued radicals is far from new, and M[onsieur] A. Bouché is not the first to have studied it.”
This is a rough translation of a statement made by M[onsieur] S. Realis in “SUR QUELQUES QUESTIONS PROPOSÉES DANS LA NOUVELLE CORRESPONDANCE, Question 142,” in Nouvelle Correspondance Mathématique, Vol. 3, 1877, Brussels, p. 193.
Realis’s dismissive comment concerns a work by Bouché from 1862.
Poems
“While poems may very well occur, they had very much better be caused.”
From a letter to Ronald Laine Latimer, Jan. 8, 1935. In Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens with a foreword by Richard Howard, University of California Press, 1996, p. 274.
Updated 17 June 2025.
dixonjjones.com 