A hisorian's poetry …

… Robert Conquest’s open eyes by Dick Davis | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

He spent much of the last half of his life in the United States, and while living there he continued the habit he had developed early in his career of writing poems centered on particular landscapes, but the tone changed quite radically. An extraordinary lyricism pervades his poems on American landscapes; they are filled with a kind of grateful acknowledgment of the fact that anything outside of the strictly personal could give such deep, continuous, unalloyed pleasure. They evoke what the critic Tony Tanner called “the reign of wonder” as he found it embodied in a great deal of nineteenth-century American literature.