Movement Poets

Introduction

The Movement consisted of a group of like-minded English poets, loosely associated together in the mid-1950’s. Their intention was to redirect the course of English poetry away from the neo-Romantic Symbolist and Imagistic poetry of William Butler Yeats and Dylan Thomas. At the same time, they also disavowed the modernist poetry of the 1920’s and 1930’s, represented by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden. Instead, they sought to place English poetry back into the tradition last represented by Thomas Hardy, of formal verse and accessible meaning, modestly covering everyday experience.

Of this group of poets, Philip Larkin (1922-1985) emerged as the most popular. His poetry did a good deal to re-engage poetry with a more popular audience. Other poets, such as Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) and John Wain (1925-1994), made wider names for themselves as novelists, especially as part of the group known as the Angry Young Men. Many of the group were academics, and their critical writings helped shape the course of British literature for the next two decades.

History

Poetry in England in the first part of the twentieth century had been subject to various conflicting movements. Before World War I, it was dominated by Georgian poetry, a formal, romantic poetry that was the legacy of Victorian poets such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. It tended to be nostalgic and rural. The continuing exponent of this formal and traditional verse in England was Hardy (1840-1928). He wrote on everyday events and meetings, often with a gentle irony or sadness. His poetry made philosophical references at a general level but did not engage directly with issues of the day. It was retiring and understated, lyrical, and mellifluous, using traditional imagery and verse forms. The poetry of Yeats (1865-1939), an Anglo-Irish poet, also was as influential. Yeats had developed a private mythology but could write politically as well. His imagery was much more symbolic and his tonalities were much more varied and original than those of Hardy.

The trauma of World War I and the new awareness created by psychoanalysis and modern science produced a quite different movement in literature, usually termed modernism. The poetic exponents of modernism were at odds with the Hardy-Yeats axis of Romanticism, and they sought to produce a much more loosely formed and structured verse that could at the same time capture everyday speech and the symbolic disassociation felt by members of the fractured postwar society. The leading exponent of modernism in England was Eliot. His The Waste Land (1922) became one of the iconic poems of the twentieth century.

The difficulties of 1920’s modernism, as exemplified in such poets as Pound, gave way in the 1930’s to a more direct political verse, reflecting the rise of extreme right- and left-wing ideologies, as well as growing social problems emerging during and after the Great Depression of the 1930’s. English poets, such as Auden and Louis MacNeice, still used modernist tropes and tonalities, but more directly.

In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, particularly through the war years of 1939 to 1945, there was something of a romantic reaction to modernism, in the gushing, energetic verse of the Welsh poet Thomas, which sparked of a neo-Romantic wave. Poets were returning to an earthier, even rural subject matter and imagery, and expressing greater concern to create music and a rich, dense, more emotional imagery. At times, mythological themes were incorporated, as in a school of writing sometimes called the Apocalyptics, which included David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins, and Kathleen Raine.

The Movement

The Movement arose as a reaction to both modernism and this neo-Romanticism, grounded in the aftermath of World War II. There was a general desire to avoid any heroic sentiments at all and to live in the ordinary here-and-now, which in postwar Britain was rather bleak and austere, with everything rationed and with an uncertain future. As a country, Britain had been bankrupted by the war and was about to lose its empire and its superpower status, but it was determined to lay the foundations of a solid welfare state and a less class-ridden society. The Cold War was about to begin, and harsh reality took the place of political idealism.

As a poetic movement, the Movement had no strong cohesion to it, no obvious “school” existing around one or two central figures. It was rather a group of young poets whose education had been completed or interrupted during the war. Many of them were academics, many from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, who had all managed a university education at Oxford or Cambridge, mainly through gaining academic scholarships. Most of them met at various times and were aware of each others’ work, although some denied they belonged to any “movement” at all.

Various events brought about cohesion and caused the literary culture of the day to label the group as the Movement. One such event was the publication in 1952 of Purity of Diction in English Verse by the young academic Donald Davie (1922-1995). Davie argued that English poetry should return to the Augustan era of the late eighteenth century, abandon modernism as an aberration, and redefine itself in terms of an older classical tradition, lost after Hardy died.

However, it is possible to go back to the war years, to the meeting of Larkin and Amis, then two young Oxford undergraduates. Both were studying English, loved jazz, and were “scholarship boys” from modest backgrounds. Though Larkin was under the influence of Yeats at the time, both Larkin and Amis disliked elitism and pretentiousness. Publication of their poems in Oxford Poetry 1949 (1949), an anthology edited by Amis, brought them acquaintance with other young poets, such as Wain and Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001). Other young poets, such as D. J. Enright (1920-2002) and Thom Gunn (1929-2004), also began writing verse that tried to be formal, precise, and unpretentious. They were influenced by the formal criticism of William Empson and F. R. Leavis, leading English professors at Cambridge University who stressed truthfulness of emotion and sincerity of tone.

In 1951, the Oxford academic F. W. Bateson began publication of the journal Essays in Criticism, which was to embrace poetry and criticism along the lines Davie was suggesting. The next year, John Lehman and Wain were hosting New Soundings, a monthly program of poetry readings by these new poets on the British Broadcasting Corporation. Their verse began to be published in various magazines, and then in three small presses: the Fortune Press in Oxfordshire, the University of Reading Press, and the Marvell Press in northern England. By this time, most of the poets had found jobs in provincial universities or at Oxford and Cambridge. Enright found a post in Japan, from where he edited Poets of the 1950’s: An Anthology of New English Verse (1955). He included his own poetry, together with that of Amis, Davie, Wain, Robert Conquest, Jennings, Larkin, and John Holloway.

On October 1, 1954, the London cultural journal The Spectator ran a main article by its literary editor, J. D. Scott, titled “In the Movement.” Scott surveyed the contemporary literary scene in an attempt to find a significant cultural shift in British society in the 1950’s. He noted the anti-idealism of this “Movement,” and the name stuck. Shortly after, Conquest, another of the Movement poets as well as a rising Sovietologist, was asked to produce an anthology of new poetry. His New Lines: An Anthology (1956-1963) contained work by nine young poets who became known as the Movement poets. They were the eight included by Enright in his anthology, with the addition of Thom Gunn, the youngest of the group.

Some, like Gunn and Larkin, denied their membership in any such group. How long the group existed is debatable. Some members, including Gunn and Davie, went to the United States in the early 1960’s, where they became caught up in other influences and found different styles. Others became better known for their novels or academic work, such as Wain, Amis, and Holloway. However, Enright, Jennings, and particularly Larkin were writing in what was recognizably the same style during the next decade and even after. Of all the poets, Larkin, although a desperately shy man who spent much of his life as a librarian at Hull University in the north of England, well away from the centers of cultural influence, gained the greatest fame and prestige.

The poetry

It is difficult to generalize about the style, content, or imagery of Movement poetry. With nine poets as members, any general statement is likely to find an exception. The poets were all born in the 1920’s, nearly all to uncultured (“philistine”) families, often with blue-collar fathers or grandfathers. For the most part, their childhoods were spent in obtaining academic educations that allowed them to gain places at the prestigious universities of Oxford or Cambridge. There they encountered the elite, class-ridden society that predominated in the arts in England at the time, and they reacted against it. They also reacted, at some point in their early writing careers, against the wordy, inflated style represented for them by the alcoholic Welsh poet Thomas, who died in 1952.

Their poetic reaction took the form of formal verse, tightly patterned, as against the free-verse style represented by Thomas. Often they returned to eighteenth century patterns, with the ironic tone that accompanied that verse. The irony was subversive, mocking, often self-deprecating. It was very aware of elitism, inflated language and attitudes. Poetic utterance came as understatement, often tentatively expressed. “Perhaps” was a favorite word. Big claims were avoided; it was the smaller details of everyday life that became significant topics, expressed in ordinary, everyday language. Often the language would have some colloquial expression in it to produce an anticlimax.

Above all, a rigorous self-examination was conducted to produce as honest a piece of writing as was possible. Thus, a poem would often move away from the poet’s perception of his emotional reaction to a situation or person, to peel away layers of false sensibility and to arrive at the poet’s genuine response. Sometimes this honesty took the form of an aggressive philistinism, a refusal to be “poetic” or “artsy.” Larkin made a point of emphasizing his own provinciality and rejected the London cultural snobbery for the ordinary truth of everyday provincial life. However, there are plenty of poems about paintings and foreign scenes that suggest the poets were, in fact, perfectly well cultured. The philistinism sometimes became a pose in itself.

The other feature of Movement poets was a refusal to make political, philosophical, or theological statements, in contrast to preceding verse. In the end, this produced a rather limited range of topics, and many poets later broke away from this, though Larkin did not. The poets seemed content with life as it was in postwar Britain, however unexciting and drab.

New Lines

These features are best exemplified in New Lines, the anthology edited by Conquest. Each poet was represented by eight to ten poems, creating a total of seventy-five poems. Some of the poems included became iconic of the Movement: Larkin’s “Church Going” and “Toads,” Jenning’s “Afternoon in Venice,” Gunn’s “On the Move,” Amis’s “Against Romanticism,” Davie’s “Limited Achievement,” and Wain’s “Eighth Type of Ambiguity.” Davie’s “Remembering the Thirties” speaks exactly for the Movement, while its reference to “a neutral tone” being preferred pays homage to Hardy, who wrote a poem with that title.

Conquest wrote a significant introduction to explain the Movement, pointing to what he considered the corruption of the previous decade’s poetry: its self-indulgence, inflated emotions, and so on. By contrast, the new poetry is “free from both mystical and logical compulsions” but concentrates on “the real person.” Interestingly, he claims George Orwell’s no-nonsense realism as a significant influence.

Enright’s “On the Death of a Child” is a good example of this. Written with Thomas’s poem on the death of a child as a subtext, Enright’s poem avoids the big gestures of grief that typified Thomas. “The big words fail to fit,” he writes. They take up “improper room.” Enright is not being callous—indeed, of all the Movement poets, he is the most sympathetic to human suffering. It is just that he wants to avoid the inflated gesture.

Jennings well exemplifies the tight construction of the poems. Her poems typically consist of three stanzas with regular metric and rhyming schemes. Often the construction of thought is logical: A, B, and therefore C, as in “Identity.” Her topic is human relationships, and the sense that a person’s identity is perhaps less important than the identity others construct of that person in love and friendship. Typical relationship topics, such as breakups, are often handled in an impersonal or ironic way, as in Holloway’s “Elegy for an Estrangement.” The seven stanzas consist of ten lines each, with a regular though unobtrusive rhyme scheme and a complex though regular metrical pattern. Such disciplined verse had been absent from English poetry for many years.

The New Poetry

Another influential anthology was The New Poetry, edited by A. Alvarez and published by Penguin in 1962. It is sometimes claimed that this is anthology was created in reaction to New Lines and was an attempt to introduce the poetry of the American poets John Berryman and Robert Lowell and the new English poet Ted Hughes, to counteract the influence of the Movement poets. However, this would be a mistake, as the anthology includes work from Enright, Davie, Larkin, Amis, Wain, and Gunn. In fact, the contributions of Enright (ten poems) and Larkin (eight) are substantial, as is that of Gunn (seventeen). Only two of Enright’s poems were repeats from the previous anthology, and only one of Larkin’s. Larkin’s very fine “Whitsun Weddings” is included, as is Davie’s “The Mushroom Gatherers.” Davie’s “Under St. Paul’s” demonstrates his breaking out of the tight Movement mold. It is a big, incantatory statement, at times more like the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins than that of Hardy. Davie, in fact, was the first Movement poet to write against the Movement, seeing its limitations and internal contradictions. Gunn’s large contributions— “Lofty at the Palais de Danse” and “Lines for a Book”—show the “philistine” stance, which threatens to become a pose. However, his “Helen’s Rape” shows the persistent influence of Yeats, an influence seen more subtly in Larkin.

Philip Larkin

Larkin’s first volume of verse, The North Ship (1945, revised 1946) was indeed very Yeatsian. His second volume, The Less Deceived, published in 1955, seemed very different, the embodiment of the Movement’s stance, ironic, self-deprecating, writing on real people in real moments of time. The often anthologized “Church Going” is typical of the “less deceived” stance of the poet. He goes into a church; he is not sure why, but presumably to look at its historical architecture. He ponders if there is a deeper reason. His stance is determinedly secular, philistine, yet there is a sense of a tradition lost and the need for the numinous, which he is both embarrassed by and fascinated with.

The title poem of The Whitsun Weddings (1964) is about another rite of passage. Ironically, “whitsun” is the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit was given to the church and when confirmees were received into the church. Larkin’s determined secularity stands out against this. However, weddings represent love, and as a bachelor, Larkin remains an embarrassed observer. The railroad journey he is on becomes a symbol of life itself, of which he is an observer, outside its real experiences. Other major themes of Larkin were aging and dying.

Larkin’s poetry has been praised for its discipline and honesty and its tentative exploring of ordinary life. Fellow poet Andrew Motion has noted the latent idealism behind the mask of deprecating irony in Larkin’s poetry and remarks on the conflicted emotions in its sadness and nostalgia. Larkin’s refusal to publish anything but the achieved poem, revised to perfection, has meant his output has been small but of a consistently high standard. The other Movement poets had no difficulty recognizing him as their best and, in fact, their most continuing standard bearer.

Later developments

Larkin’s poetry was modeled on that of Hardy, though still influenced by Yeats. However, Hardy’s range is limited, and many Movement poets soon felt that limitation. Gunn’s poetry, now based on his California experiences and the first signs of the 1960’s counterculture experience, was soon being bracketed with that of Hughes, as much more elemental, violent, and unconstrained. As the influence of Hughes and Lowell grew in England, that of the Movement poets lessened. Their underlying egalitarianism became expressed more through their novels, such as Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953; pb. in U.S. as Born in Captivity) and Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), or through the new Angry Young Men drama of John Osborne.

Davie found himself returning to his religious roots, which as a young man had been merely “nonconformist” in a secular way. In this, he joined Jennings, always a devoted Catholic, who began increasingly exploring her faith and the effects of various mental breakdowns. Enright continued to write restrained, controlled poetry, but as he was working in the Far East, his subject matter appeared somewhat exotic. Conquest and Holloway pursued other careers as diplomats or academics. New Lines II: An Anthology (1963), edited by Conquest, included many new poets outside the Movement, some of whom had been antagonistic to it.

It was thus left to Larkin to continue the Movement into the 1960’s and beyond. However, his very retiring nature and the paucity of his output meant his influence on poetry was less than it might have been. However, his residual influence, and that of the Movement as a whole, brought a healthy discipline back to English verse, probably best seen in the work of Motion, who later became poet laureate, a post that Larkin had previously refused. Davie, Jennings, and Larkin were all in turn entrusted with significant volumes in the Oxford Books of Verse series.

Bibliography

Bradley, Jerry. The Movement: British Poets of the 1950’s. New York: Twayne, 1993. Part of the English Authors series, this book devotes a general chapter to the Movement, and separate chapters to each of the nine main members, followed by a very useful bibliography.

Davie, Donald. Purity of Diction in English Verse. London: Chatto & Windus, 1952. This is the groundbreaking text that acted as a manifesto for the Movement. Davie went on to publish many other critical studies and became an acclaimed university teacher in Great Britain and the United States.

Leader, Zachary. Amis. New York: Pantheon, 2006. A very full biography of Kingsley Amis, setting him in the context of the 1950’s and examining his wider influence, as well as his friendships with other Movement poets.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, and Their Contemporaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. A collection of original essays by distinguished poets, critics, and scholars from Great Britain and the United States, seeking to reassess the Movement and to place it in a wider sociohistorical context.

Morrison, Blake. The Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. This is the first full-length study of the group as a whole, written while its members were all still alive and publishing.

Motion, Andrew. Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. London: Faber & Faber, 1993. A fairly biographical account building on an earlier 1983 biography. Motion brings out Larkin’s latent Romanticism and the tension this caused him with his antiromantic writings.

Swarbrick, Andrew. Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. A sensible analysis of Larkin’s poetry, with one chapter devoted to his particular relationship with the Movement. He builds on the groundbreaking work on Larkin by Andrew Motion.