What should we make of the poetry of Robert Conquest? “Conquest is ever the realist, never the idealist,” Patrick Kurp writes in The Los Angeles Review of Books. “Softer hearts will call him cynical, mercenary, reactionary. They are mistaken.” More:

Some writers lay undisputed claim to a territory, geographical and otherwise, and thus discourage rivals from trespassing. Early 20th-century Alexandria, Egypt, belongs to Cavafy. Dublin, Ireland, of course, is Joyce’s; as Albany, New York, is William Kennedy’s. The coastal region of Liguria in Northwestern Italy is inarguably Eugenio Montale’s proprietary realm; its sea and sunlight are his. In his first collection, the commonsensically titled Poems (1955), Robert Conquest included ‘A Problem,’ six eight-line stanzas opening with ‘Liguria tingles with peculiar light. / The sea and sky exchange their various blues.’ What follows reads, at first, like a linguistically sophisticated travel brochure: sun, rocks, dry weeds, the sea. Then Conquest opens the aperture wider and launches his challenge to Montale: ‘And here / Man might, as well as anywhere, / Combine his landscapes and philosophies.’ The next stanza and a half return to the painterly mode, followed by this: ‘Where wood and sea and sky and hill / Give static broad simplicities, its course / At once more complex and more simple / Appears to thought as an example, / Like the complex, simple movement of great verse.’

And there we have, in its oxymoronic purity, a poetic credo. Verse is ‘complex, simple,’ which might be interpreted as antimodernist defiance — metrically sophisticated, rhymed, rationally comprehensible, with no wooing of incoherence. In short, poetry that nonpoets might enjoy as they once did Tennyson and Frost. Did Conquest have Montale in mind when writing ‘A Problem’? For all I know, he never heard of the Italian master. The point is that from the start Conquest was a confident cosmopolitan, as a historian ought to be. Among his recurrent themes are love and sex, science and poetry. The verse — Conquest’s preferred usage — in Collected Poems, edited by his widow Elizabeth Conquest, some 60 years of it, is vast and various in every sense.

In other news: An editor added a reference to COVID-19 in Don Delillo’s forthcoming novel, The Silence. He took it out: “I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, ‘There’s no reason for that.’”

Soviet spies targeted George Orwell during the Spanish Civil War: “Newly unearthed files reveal that the author and his wife were under Soviet surveillance while fighting in civil war.”

Oxford—where ideas go to die: “The lure of its outward narrative as a cradle of learning, a fertile ground in which quirky ideas and quirkier personalities flourish, remains a beguiling one for the nation and the individual, but even a passing acquaintance with the place leaves one standing, instead, in the midst of the graveyard, surrounded by ghosts.”

Patrick Marnham reviews a new literary guide to Paris. If you’re an American, you won’t be going there any time soon. All the more reason to pick this book up: “The book’s several hundred members, as assembled by Gransard, make up a bizarre but colorful potpourri: Harold Acton and Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Burroughs and Capote, and so on to Nabokov, Stein, Toklas, Whitman, Woolf and Yeats. Trotsky and Lenin both fell in love in Paris, and Trotsky’s son was poisoned by Stalin’s secret police in the 16th arrondissement in an expensive private hospital (plus ça change). The days of liberation in 1944 marked a brief intersection of fantasy and reality; Camus and Beckett, who had risked torture and death in the Resistance, could watch Hemingway making a fool of himself, tearing around in a Jeep, draped in bandoliers. Twentieth Century Paris is more of a literary companion than a guide: a roll call of creativity, based on wide research, with a wealth of anecdote.”

Michael Wilding revisits the poetry of Australia’s Byronic bushman, Adam Lindsay Gordon: “In the 150 years since Adam Lindsay Gordon’s death in 1870 his reputation as a poet rose to great heights, celebrated as the “National Poet of Australia” with his bust in Westminster Abbey in 1934, only to decline to neglect and comparative obscurity . . . Tennyson was a significant contemporary influence. Clarke cites others . . .  ‘The influence of Browning and of Swinburne upon the writer’s taste is plain.’ But at the same time Gordon had been providing rhyming racing tips for Bell’s Sporting Life in Australia. The emphasis here is on the immediate—on contemporary, colloquial idiom, and on a fluent, informal manner, capturing the conversational and spontaneous.”

The painter Frank Bowling is knighted: “In 2019, artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen accepted the knighthood; he said, ‘Because I’m from here and if they want to give me an award, I’ll have it, thank you very much.’ Bowling, who was born in British Guiana and is based in London and New York, had a similar reaction to McQueen. In a statement, he said, ‘Trained in the English art school tradition, my identity as a British artist has always been crucial to me and I have viewed London as my home since arriving in 1953 from what was then British Guiana. To be recognised for my contribution to British painting and art history with a knighthood makes me extremely proud.’”

Photo: Château d’Amboise