In his introduction to New Lines (1956), the anthology that fostered the Movement, the British poet and historian Robert Conquest observed that
in the 1940s the mistake was made of giving the Id, a sound player on the percussion side under a strict conductor, too much of a say in the doings of the orchestra as a whole… . The most glaring fault awaiting correction when the new period opened was the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry.
Emotion in poetry, Conquest cautioned, had begun to crowd out such mainstays as “rational structure and comprehensible language.” Mindful that poetry cannot live by the bread of intellect alone, Conquest argued that reason, salted with experience and leavened by passion, remains the staple of distinguished writing, verse and prose alike. As New Lines showed—with its selection of work by Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Conquest, and others— a balance could still be struck between “human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, [and] language,” as Coleridge put it. In his seventh collection of poems, Demons Don’t, Conquest manages such equipoise even today—no small feat given the levels of emotionalism and opacity that poets have achieved since the middle Fifties. With Conquest’s characteristic wit, an epigraph announces the book’s no-nonsense contents: “Lyric, novella, satire, ode/ In many a mood and many a mode/ And not a single one in code …”
Of Conquest’s many moods and modes, two seem foremost here: a sometimes unabashedly erotic love poetry and a well-tuned way with light verse. Take as an example of the former the postcoital ruminations of “Beyond Them”:
For through her smile’s
Full calm there glowed, quick, unexpected,
A coherence of irrefutables.
Not just her cream-bronze candor displayed
On the coverlet’s cream-citron
Chenille as early eventide
Gently shone through the soft curtain.Not just the high, hand-filling breasts,
Or vision sweeping the tactility of
The smooth, hand-smoothing thigh-and-
waist’s
Concord of curves. Not even love.
Memory records the scene, the poem goes on to suggest, much the way a painter seeks to “fix the exact point” of his observation “to some cool attitude of truth,” in an image that remains “unfadingly engraved/ In the scan of his mind’s eye, year after year.” Needless to say, the poem itself constitutes just such a bid to preserve the moment.
For anyone unfamiliar with Conquest’s exuberant and scurrilous correspondence with Philip Larkin (or Larkin’s possible characterization of him and Amis in “Letter to a Friend about Girls”), Conquest dispels any residual suspicions of prudery in “A Tasting”: “One should satisfy neither/ The emotional heavy breather/ Nor the uptight, unsexed/ Sniffer of dried text.” Conquest’s red-blooded approach to Eros in these poems refreshes rather than repels. For someone critics have accused of blokishness, Conquest writes with great subtlety and often with great tenderness. In the elegiac “Only Natural,” a young man learns that the woman he’s recently begun a sexual relationship with is moving away. After sitting through an excruciating sendoff dinner with her family, the man endures his lover’s overly formal good-bye before exiting alone:
Outside. The moon’s gone: but his
Sight after a few moments adjusts
To the underbrush’s intricacies
Of shade, the high overcast’sSmooth smudged charcoal, the upflung
Foliate antennae edging more sharply
Their arched life form, as he treads along
Its track to the cliff-top, to descryThe northern ness’s distant chalk-face
Now an almost livid non-pallor,
And West the sleek panther-black sea’s
Slow pulse… .
“He’s hurt,” Conquest goes on to say, but he needn’t have. The desolation in the tone gives the scene away, weedy language creating a tenebrous underbrush of emotion, as the boy confronts the livid face of the ness appearing to him in the dark.
Equally assured in a variety of registers (a token of his mastery), Conquest attacks the same subject matter from a decidedly different angle in “Lost Love”:
“The climate of the heart”—Young men
Who think they won’t survive it when
That organ takes the icy blast
May find that once the winter’s past
Their blood’s been only slightly thinned
By the unprevailing wind.
In his piece on the limerick, “There Was a Young Fellow,” from his exemplary collection of literary essays The Abomination of Moab (1979), Conquest japes that “[Hilaire] Belloc makes it an accusation against women that they ‘confuse levity with frivolity’, but if so there are many effeminate men.” The same confusion besets readers who would denigrate light verse as trivial. A. A. Milne, whom Kingsley Amis quoted in the introduction to his New Oxford Book of English Light Verse, sets the record straight with regard to poetic “lightness”: “It is not bastard poetry on a frivolous theme. It is true humor expressing itself in perfectly controlled rhyme and rhythm.” Occasionally, Conquest’s humor tends toward a clarifying biliousness, as in his epigram “The Logic of Revolution”:
Ow! A great acorn just fell on my head!
Cut down that oak; plant a upas instead!
We laugh, ruefully. The exotic upas sounds downright Carrollean beside the stalwart oak, until we discover that the name means “poison tree” in Malay, so-called for its use in tainting arrow heads. (Upas-tipped levity also governs the tone of Conquest’s great limerick “Progress,” which begins “There was a great Marxist called Lenin.”) As Conquest puts it in “Whenever,” some fifty years ago Wyndham Lewis trumpeted that his age required “a tongue that naked goes/ Without more fuss than Dryden’s or Defoe’s.” With an ensuing litany of man’s latest shortcomings, Conquest makes it brutally clear that, “even more than Lewis’s,” our age calls for a capable satirist. Not many contemporary poets, it seems, are interested in assuming the mantle, though the few that have done so deserve our thanks—Tom Disch, Turner Cassity, and Robert Conquest.