Discovery …

… Unpublished poems by Robert Conquest | Standpoint. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The war’s effect on my own writing (in intention at least) was to make me seek clarity and honesty untainted by the symbolism and pretentiousness that marred the poetry I had written as an undergraduate. It also — in the Mediterranean Theatre, though this would not probably be so true of the Western Front — made one more sensitive and responsive to the qualities of sky and landscape, of the phenomenal world, in contrast both to the ruined cities and desolated farmlands and to one’s own possible impending extinction.