Entertaining Amis

Abstract

Kingsley Amis’s poems have always made critics a trifle nervous, partly because he is such a re-readable novelist that it seems hardly fair he should perform so well in verse. Then there is the presence of Larkin over his shoulder, a writer whose poems take on depths of gloomy richness that Amis, wisely I think, doesn’t attempt to match. Speaking as an American, it’s my impression that news of Amis the poet has barely reached these shores; in college classrooms at least, Larkin is read and admired while Amis gets there, when he does, as the author of Lucky Jim. This is fair enough, but makes it harder for the poems to receive their due. He has been referred to as a ‘non-Commissioned Larkin’, also fair enough if we remember that the NCO’s have their own club at which Amis’s poetic act is one of the best things currently viewable. At any rate, as someone who for years has been sending people copies of ‘Lovely’ (‘Look thy last on all things lovely/Every hour, an old shag said’), I should like to suggest why his poetry is a civilised resource, the sort of thing you want to read aloud to another person.