Robert Conquest has died at the age of 93. By the end of his life, he was best known as a historian, whose landmark book The Great Terror detailed Stalin's brutal purges. Conquest's assessment of Stalin's aims and methods, controversial when The Great Terror first appeard in 1968, was largely vindicated when new information came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union. (When a new edition of the book was published in 1990, Conquest wanted to call it I Told You So, You F***ing Fools.)

But long before Conquest became famous as a historian, he was known as a poet. He belonged to a group of British writers known collectively as The Movement, which included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, and Elizabeth Jennings. It was a fairly heterogeneous group, more a ragged circle than a movement. Its members all belonged to roughly the same generation, but had little else in common apart from a desire to get out from under the shadow of literary modernism. Most of them were more influenced by Yeats and Robert Graves than by Eliot and Pound.

Amis, who also wrote poetry, became famous as a novelist. Larkin became the most important poet of postwar Britain. Thom Gunn moved to northern California, joined the counterculture, and started writing free verse.* Elizabeth Jennings, a Catholic, enjoyed a loyal following but was never taken as seriously as the Movement men—and certainly not as seriously as she deserved to be taken. (She was never well known in the U.S.)

Conquest's reputation as a historian eventually eclipsed his reputation as a poet, though not totally: among those who love the limerick, he was considered a modern master. After the jump, three of his finest (with unasterisked profanity).

The first is a summary of Shakespeare's famous seven-ages-of-man speech in As You Like It: 

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

The second is a summary of his own historical work on Soviet atrocities:

There was an old bastard named Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in
That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

And finally a limerick about limericks, taking off from Wordsworth's "Scorn not the Sonnet":

Then scorn not the limerick either,
Though as Tennyson said, who knows why the
Fuck such a rhyme
Makes the grim reaper Time
Such a markedly blither old scyther.

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*Rereading this sentence about Gunn, I worry that it might appear dismissive, which is not what I intended. Gunn was in many ways the most interesting poet to have emerged from the Movement, the one who managed combine what was freshest and most vital in the work of that group with an appreciation for, and an affinity with, the real achievements of modernists like Pound and Basil Bunting. Larkin may have been the more important poet—the more read, the more written about—but I'm not sure he was the greater.