The best poet of the Divan style in America is the critic Edmund Wilson, who has a genius for conveying the very taste and smell of old, unhappy, far-off seductions — a regular heterosexual Cavafy. His rigorously unsentimental contemporaries refuse to take him seriously as a poet.

Wilson was no shrinking violet, but he knew his limitations. He knew that his touch with language wasn’t particularly suggestive so he went for precision instead. He possessed a lot of information to be precise with. Where his verse is excessive, it is the excess of the seed catalogue – a superfluity of facts. He never usurps the lyrical genius’s prerogative of saying more than he knows. Nor did he ever consider himself talented enough to be formless – his formal decorum always reminds us that he stems from the early 20th-century America which in retrospect seems more confident than Europe itself about transmitting the European tradition. The work is all very schooled, neat, strict and assured. And finally there is his gift for parody, which sometimes led him beyond mere accomplishment and into the realm of inspiration. In ‘The Omelet of A. MacLeish’, for example, the talent of his verse is reinforced by the genius of his criticism, with results more devastating critically than his essays on the same subject, and more vivid poetically than his usual poems.