Amis's reading at the Library of Congress was for its Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature, begun in 1943 by Allen Tate, at the time consultant in poetry to the library. Amis put some thought and effort into preparing the reading, which was held on 13 October, writing to the Poetry Office with the estimated lengths of individual poems and prose extracts and confessing that he found the task of selection difficult, "there being much to bear in mind regarding completeness, contrast etc." All the poems he read came from [his 1956 collection] A Case of Samples. He also read three prose extracts, one from each of the novels. The poems were grouped to show the range of his verse, an important feature to him. "Every poem is an attempt at solving a completely new problem," he had written in his statement of purpose in [D. J.] Enright's Poets of the 1950s (1955), adding that he was drawn to verse forms "I haven't used before, or at any rate until recently." Hence, in part, the title A Case of Samples....

W.S. Merwin reviewed A Case of Samples in the New York Times and identified its contents as of three kinds: "poems of generalized intellectual statement, dense with wit of the sort inevitably called metaphysical"; a second sort of serious poem, "ironic or elegiac, or both; describing, or telling stories, both very well"; and "the overtly funny pieces," which "owe as much to Auden and Betjeman as they do to Empson" and are for the most part "enviable: hard, delightful and as funny on the third reading as on the first." The opening three poems Amis read at the Library of Congress belong to Merwin's second grouping. Amis's pencilled note for "Masters" (in a copy in the Huntington Library which contains introductory notes for most of the poems he read in Washington) identifies it as "anthology piece—generalizing on military men, empire builders." As the opening stanza makes clear, the poem is about control, a central concern of the volume as a whole, as of other Movement volumes: fearfulness motivates and underlies the military man's air of mastery (as it does the poet's)....

W.S. Merwin thought Amis's poems were sometimes "sentimental in a peculiar slangy, brittle way," and this is true of "A Bookshop Idyll," another poem about control and release. The introductory note to it in the Huntington copy reads "Bad po more afectg than it shd be: mawkishness cleverness littiness." The "bad po" in question is the sort chosen and written by women: "love po." Again, what the poem admires is something beyond control, beyond "cleverness littiness." The risk it runs is "mawkishness," sentimentality. This risk Amis acknowledged in the Enright anthology, conceding that for "the newer poets, including myself, . . . the strict forms seem to give some of them the idea that they can be as sentimental and trite as they please, provided they do it in terza rima." Here are the final stanzas of "A Bookshop Idyll":

                      Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
                         Or squash it flat?
                      Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
                         Girls aren't like that.

                      We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
                         Can get by without it.
                      Women don't seem to think that's good enough;
                         They write about it,

                      And the awful way their poems lay them open
                         Just doesn't strike them.
                      Women are really much nicer than men:
                         No wonder we like them.

                      Deciding this, we can forget those times
                         We sat up half the night
                      Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts,
                        names, rhymes,
                        And couldn't write.


When in 1986 the feminist academic Jan Montefiore wrote to Amis asking for permission to quote "A Bookshop Idyll" in a monograph she had written on feminism and poetry, she included the reading that would accompany it. Amis wrote back granting permission but taking issue with the reading: "I really don't suggest (nor is it my opinion) that the love-poem is a quintessentially female mode; I was trying to make a more general point to the effect that women are less inhibited about expressing their feelings than men are, at any rate in our society. And though I'm pleased you think the poem good-natured, surely the people it patronises are not women but men, who cut a pretty sorry figure in the last verse."

Amis read "A Bookshop Idyll" just after an extract from Lucky Jim. The second of the novel extracts he read was the episode in Chapter 10 of That Uncertain Feeling [an episode of broad farce], and Amis may have chosen it in conscious defiance of Edmund Wilson, whose New Yorker review singled it out as "weak," "clumsily implausible." As if in contrast, Amis then read a group of five distinctly "serious" poems, all in different ways about poetry, even when poetry is never mentioned. "On Staying Still," for example, is ostensibly about a broken boat lying halfway up the beach on Swansea Bay. Donald Davie once lamented the absence "of outward and non-human things apprehended crisply for their own sakes" in Movement poetry. He has a point with Amis, as Amis wittily admitted in "Here Is Where," also from A Case of Samples. This is how "Here Is Where" begins:

                                 Here, where the ragged water
                                 Is twilled and spun over
                                 Pebbles backed like beetles,
                                 Bright as beer-bottles,
                                 Bits of it like snow beaten,
                                 Or milk boiling in saucepan ...

                                 Going well so far, eh?

This is how the poem ends:

                                 The country, to townies,
                                 Is hardly more than nice,
                                 A window-box, pretty
                                 When the afternoon's empty;
                                 When a visitor waits,
                                 The window shuts.


One of the remarkable things about "Here Is Where" is how good the opening lines are; the similes all work, help to describe things seen or there. Amis can, if required, "apprehend crisply" the outward and the non-human; it is simply that he refuses to do so "for their own sakes." As he says in a middle stanza. "Why drag in / All that water and Stone?" In 'On Staying Still', they are dragged in to make a point about poetry…. The poetical implications of the contrast between the boat's stillness and the sea's violent motion emerge through the terms Amis uses in describing the tide-rise: "poses," "Bravery," "gesture," "eloquence." The pencilled note in the Huntington copy reads: "Real experience — broodg shows po here unspectacular virtue or mere avoidance of showy self-regarding energy." The "po" Amis admires, figured in the boat, is real, understated, unrhetorical, unlike the sea's "eloquence of loud noise." In its showiness and "self-regard" the sea's energy is like that of the wind in Amis's 'Ode to the East-North-East-by-East Wind', also from A Case of Samples, though not read in Washington. The Huntington note to the "Ode" reads: "atak on conv. Rism [Romanticism] — Shelley[;] also hatred of wind: not just symbol."

The themes of "On Staying Still" are taken up more explicitly in "Against Romanticism," the last of the poems in its grouping (hence Robert Conquest's decision to include it in the polemical New Lines Anthology).These are its opening lines:

       A traveller who walks a temperate zone
         — Woods devoid of beasts, roads that please the foot —
       Finds that its decent surface grows too thin:
         Something unperceived fumbles at his nerves.
       To please an ingrown taste for anarchy
         Torrid images circle in the wood,
       And sweat for recognition up the road
        Cramming close the air with their bookish cries.


The cries from the images "in the wood" and "up the road" are "bookish" because they come from literature or fantasy, not life. The poet disapproves of them but also implies that their appearance is inevitable: eventually the traveller grows tired of decent surfaces (metre, for instance); the taste for anarchy that causes 'something unperceived' to fumble at his nerves is "ingrown." At its most considered, in poems like this, Amis's opposition to the Romantic is corrective, an attempt to restore a balance. The poem has no illusions about putting an end to Romantic impulses, to prophecy, idealism or rage; it is a counterweight to, not a negation of, the tendencies against which it kicks. The propensity to dream, the Romantic propensity, may be weakness, but it is ineradicable.