Laudator Temporis Acti

Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006; rpt. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), pp. 192-193:

[H]e had very little to say in favour of any author on the English syllabus. In a letter to Larkin of 18 March 1946, he writes of an impending college examination on that ‘fine old relic of Anglo-Saxon culture; that remarkable survival of that civilization from which our own, in however indirect a fashion, is derived; I refer of course to the anonymous, crass, purblind, infantile, featureless HEAP OF GANGRENED ELEPHANT'S SPUTUM, “Barewolf”’. Two months later he composes a poem entitled ‘Beowulf', a revised version of which appears in Bright November. Its last stanza reads:

Someone has told us this man was a hero.
But what have we to learn in following
His tedious journey to his ancestors
(An instance of Old English harking back)?

On 23 August 1947, in response to a letter praising the study of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, in the periodical Time and Tide, Amis wrote an anonymous reply (his first published letter) arguing that the subject was ‘void of appeal’ to many undergraduates and only on the syllabus because it was easy to mark. As for Anglo-Saxon literature: ‘the prose is admitted even by initiates to be stumbling and graceless; the verse is shackled by continual repetition of idea’. The heroic content of the verse, moreover, is barbarous:

The warriors and broken-down retainers who strut bawling across its pages repel by their childish fits of self-glorification and self-pity; exploits stated but not shown to be glorious are shown but not stated to derive from self-interest dressed up as duty and lust for renown masquerading as nobility, the whole interleaved with natural descriptions in which every poetic opportunity is missed and moral maxims of an indescribable triteness.

Medieval literature is almost as bad. Though Leishman ‘pronounced himself “very pleased” with my essay on the levels of Cah warrggh Chaucer's fart’, this was because Amis hid what he really thought. As he writes to Larkin on 15 May 1946: ‘If I say, that I am of the opinion, that the levels, of his art, anywhere, are all, of the same level, as the level, of the big pipe, that takes away, the waste matter, from a public lavatory … then, I am sure, the man, who teaches me, will, be quite sure, that I am, trying to be funny, and will not, like it, at all, THE SODDING OLD FOOL.’ A year later Amis has a new antipathy, worse even than Chaucer (though still not as bad as Beowulf): Dryden. On 26 March 1947 he suggests to Larkin a new scale for assessing literary merit: ‘I think “one dryden” ought to be a sort of unit of hate for a writer — only D. achieves 1.00, elsewhere the figure is always less than one, eg, —

Johnson .5 dryden                        Jonson .85 dryden
Keats .5        "                              Shelley .85    "
Milton .9       "                              Chaucer .9    "
                                                   (i.e. ‘tends to’ 1 dryd.)