'This Reverence for the Real Person or Event'

“Books I’ve reread in the past year, and mean to again, not a bad criterion . . .”

A time-honored journalistic convention: late each year, editors of newspapers and magazines ask writers, readers and “thinkers” to suggest books that might be given as Christmas presents or, more interestingly, volumes they have read and enjoyed in the previous twelve months. Of course, the request provides some the opportunity to fabulate their twelfth reading of the Grundrisse, but that’s to be expected among “thinkers.”

The line at the top is how the poet and historian Robert Conquest begins his contribution to a book roundup published in the December 1977 issue of The American Spectator. His terse criterion is a handy litmus test for judging the worthiness of a book: Do I want to read it again? Conquest has reread Gibbon’s Decline and Fail of the Roman Empire because “[O]ne always finds something new -- model literary criticism (of the poet Claudian), a note on homosexuality (from which, though almost universally found, he believes, and hopes, that the Negro in his own lands is exempt).”

Next, the twelve-novel cycle A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, “our finest novelist, which makes you see why most other fiction, and sociological writing, is so false.” The final novel in the series, Hearing Secret Harmonies, had been published just two years earlier.

These are followed by two books I haven’t read: The Age of Arthur (1973) by John Morris, “not another Camelot-quickie, but a spirited and philosophical book by a scholar on the origins of the consensual polities of Britain”; and Controversial Essays by John Sparrow (1966) which, Conquest tells us,

“ . . . includes superbly destructive pieces on the Lawrence and Housman industries, the latter a model of the cool demolition of portentous pseudo-scholarship. Housman himself is of course fine, and I’d give his Collected Poems for my fifth, except that this year Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, endlessly skilled and interesting, has got itself dipped into more often: add Hardy and you gain full immunity against Dylan Goon and such.”

That final phrase I take to be Conquest-Larkin-Amis-style goofing on the popular and unreadable Dylan Thomas. Conquest, of course, edited the influential poetry anthology New Lines in 1956. It formalized the loosely related poets known as The Movement in England, in opposition to the neo-Romantics Thomas, George Barker and others who mistook grandiloquent hot air for poetry. In his introduction to New Lines, Conquest writes of the poetry he collects:

“[I]t submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and—like modern philosophy—is empirical in its attitude to all that comes. This reverence for the real person or event is, indeed, part of the general intellectual ambience . . . of our time.”

Referring to Yeats, a significant influence on the young Larkin, Conquest commends the Irish poet’s “refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language, even when the verse is most highly charged with sensuous or emotional intent.”