Donald Rayfield
Pro-Sex, Anti-Stalin
Collected Poems
By Robert Conquest (Edited by Elizabeth Conquest)
Waywiser Press 440pp £24.99
Few people – perhaps only Friedrich von Schiller and Alexander Pushkin – have achieved, like Robert Conquest, distinction as both historians and poets. Conquest’s reputation as a poet was highest in the mid-1940s and 1950s, when his name was spoken in conjunction with Philip Larkin’s and T S Eliot’s and he was hailed as Thomas Hardy’s heir. He achieved fame early in his career by winning a prize for the best long poem about the Second World War, ‘For the Death of a Poet’ (the poet was Drummond Allison, killed in Italy in December 1943). There is little mourning in the poem, but magnificent scene-setting, stoical reflection and virtuoso rhythmic and metrical skills. Had the poem been written in the context of the First World War, it would be classed alongside Wilfred Owen’s work and anthologised.
One event in particular inspired both the poet and the historian in Conquest: the 1944 Stalinist takeover in Bulgaria, which resulted in the murder not just of non-communists but also of the home-grown communist resistance. The triumph of Stalin and the complicity in it of the Western allies overshadowed the
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
It is a triumph @arthistorynews and my review @Lit_Review is here!
In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his success?
John Adamson investigates.
John Adamson - Love Island with Ruffs
John Adamson: Love Island with Ruffs - The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
literaryreview.co.uk
During the 1930s, Winston Churchill retired to Chartwell, his Tudor-style country house in Kent, where he plotted a return to power.
Richard Vinen asks whether it’s time to rename the decade long regarded as Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’.
Richard Vinen - Croquet & Conspiracy
Richard Vinen: Croquet & Conspiracy - Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm by Katherine Carter
literaryreview.co.uk