kind of book, and not just those written by Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie—are conceived, written, brokered, published, distributed, reviewed, received, brought to the book-buying public and, in rare cases, taken beyond it into the much vaguer and less strictly demarcated world of film and television.” As for taste, his definition is less satisfactory (necessarily) but refers loosely to a consensus about literary quality—how it is made, whose taste is determinative, and how it relates to popularity or book prizes are important parts of that subject. Writing a book like this requires broad reading and archival research, and Taylor casually reveals familiarity with not just the history of literary journalism but with the lesser-known books of many novelists who are themselves nearly unremembered. Writing such a book also requires an individual voice. He is good at summing up his characters, as in his account of Ian Hamilton, biographer and editor of The New Review: “Once the mythological fog has drifted away from the Pillars of Hercules, the Soho pub in which, beneath a cloud of cigarette smoke, Hamilton held court for the best part of a decade, something of his true nature looms into focus: a detached and almost painfully austere figure, much exercised by ‘standards’ and the question of poetic authenticity.” He attributes to John Lehmann (founder of the London Magazine) “a note common to nearly every decade of recent English literary history, the lament of the cultivated literary gentleman who finds himself marooned on an inhospitable strand by the changing tides of public taste.” Generalizations like these are not hazarded without plenty of particulars to support them. For anyone interested in following changes in the literary world and the dispositions of “taste”—not to mention authorial incomes and lifestyles, the relative authority of Oxford, Cambridge, and the new universities, the sad final years of Angus Wilson and Simon Raven, Edith Sitwell’s reactions to public mockery, Orwell on the BBC and Eliot as “critical hierophant,” the rise and fall of books pages and literary magazines, and many other matters having to do with the production and reception of literature—this is an indispensable book.

中文翻译：

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丰盛的诗人

一种书，而不仅仅是伊恩·麦克尤恩和萨尔曼·拉什迪写的那些书——是经过构思、编写、代理、出版、分发、审查、接收、带给购买图书的公众的，并且在极少数情况下，超出了它的范围电影和电视界的界限更加模糊和不那么严格。” 至于品味，他的定义不太令人满意（必然），但粗略地提到了关于文学质量的共识——它是如何制作的，谁的品味是决定性的，以及它如何与流行或图书奖相关联是该主题的重要组成部分。写这样一本书需要广泛的阅读和档案研究，泰勒随便透露，他不仅熟悉文学新闻的历史，还熟悉许多小说家鲜为人知的书，他们自己几乎不记得了。写这样一本书也需要个人的声音。他善于总结自己的人物，正如他对《新评论》的传记作者兼编辑伊恩·汉密尔顿 (Ian Hamilton) 的描述中那样：烟雾缭绕，汉密尔顿在法庭上度过了十年的大部分时间，他的真实本性逐渐成为焦点：一个超然且几乎令人痛苦的严肃形象，在很大程度上受到“标准”和诗意真实性问题的影响。” 他将约翰·莱曼（伦敦杂志的创始人）归功于“几乎每十年英国文学史上的一个共同注解，这位有教养的文学绅士发现自己被公众品味的变化浪潮困在了荒凉的边缘”。如果没有足够的细节来支持它们，像这样的概括是不会冒险的。