Robert Conquest, RIP

Robert Conquest has died at the age of 93. By the end of his life, he was best known as a historian, whose landmark book The Great Terror detailed Stalin's brutal purges. Conquest's assessment of Stalin's aims and methods, controversial when The Great Terror first appeard in 1968, was largely vindicated when new information came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union. (When a new edition of the book was published in 1990, Conquest wanted to call it I Told You So, You F***ing Fools.)

But long before Conquest became famous as a historian, he was known as a poet. He belonged to a group of British writers known collectively as The Movement, which included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, and Elizabeth Jennings. It was a fairly heterogeneous group, more a ragged circle than a movement. It's members all belonged to roughly the same generation, but had little else in common apart from a desire to get out from under the shadow of literary modernism. Most of them were more influenced by Yeats and Robert Graves than by Eliot and Pound.

Amis, who also wrote poetry, became famous as a novelist. Larkin became the most important poet of postwar Britain. Thom Gunn moved to northern California, joined the counterculture, and started writing free verse. Elizabeth Jennings, a Catholic, enjoyed a loyal following but was never taken as seriously as the Movement men, and certainly not as seriously as she deserved to be taken. (She was never well known in the U.S.)

Conquest's reputation as a historian eventually eclipsed his reputation as a poet, though not totally: among those who love the limerick, he was considered a modern master. After the jump, three of his finest (with unasterisked profanity).

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Canonical link: Robert Conquest, RIP