CHAPTER-1

TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH POETRY UPTO THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY BRITISH POETRY UPTO THE MOVEMENT

INTRODUCTION TO THE TOPIC:

Diversity in Unity: Elizabeth Jennings – A British Woman Poet.

The present doctoral research project intends to analyze and study diversity in

unity in the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings who is the only woman poet of the 1950s —

— The Movement. Unity is in a sense that the poets of the 1950s have been classified

under the common grouping The Movement. Unity implies the traits, themes,

sensibilities, techniques these nine Movement poets have in common. Here diversity

is in a sense that Jennings is the sole woman poetess with her ‗conviction in the

dignity of being human‘ one driven by her Roman Catholic outlook among the unity

of male Movement poets. Jennings being a woman poet differs from her male

counterparts in terms of theme, language, sensibility, conventions, faith, outlook,

Confessionalism, Romanticism, and Mysticism and with the similar and diverse

themes of Movement poetry.

The Movement as a whole is unified in a sense with its common traits, themes,

techniques among the group members. Common traits and similarities with the poets

of the Movement group make Jennings a part of the Movement grouping and the

uncommon features makes her diverse from the group.

The path Jennings‘ poetry took was highly influenced by two events which

occurred early in her life: first her trip to Rome in 1957 and secondly,the mental break

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down that she suffered in the early 1960s.Both of these saw her poetry take a pointed

turn away from the characteristically secular rational Movement poetry.

Being a woman poet, her poetry draws upon a new kind of rational discourse,

feminist mystique, language, and idiom. Though she denies being a confessional poet

there are some autobiographical elements in her poetry which find resemblance to her

personal life and there is a revaluing of new confessional poetry as an important

progression in 20th century poetry. Therefore her poetry can be evaluated from

feminist and confessional point of view also. Jennings‘ poetry can be evaluated from

diverse angles like the Movement Poetry, Catholicism, Feminism, Romanticism and

redefining poetry of new Confessionalism. Finally the project aims to bring into the

fore what undercurrent of life she‘s been successful in divulging and what not and

exploring in depth her lesser known works and identifying them as vital to her oeuvre.

In desiring to examine the work of a minor, contemporary, English poet, I

have been influenced by the remarks of critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Malcom

Cowley has recommended that one must: ―select works of art worth writing about,

with special emphasis on works that are new, not much discussed, or widely

misunderstood‖(Cowley 47).Further according to him the describing, analyzing or

reinterpreting of the literature should deepen the ―readers‖ capacity for appreciation‖

(47).

Graham Hough‘s statement appears equally significant: ―Criticism has always

been necessary to sort out the significant from the trivial, the original from the merely

repetitive…‖ and may achieve most by elucidating the difficult by relating on writer

to another, or to the tradition in which he works. As he says: ―If the lesser writers

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were not reread by somebody….many pleasures and illuminations will be lost and the

position of the important writers will be falsified‖ (Hough 707).

It can be ascertained there has been no major full length studies made of

Elizabeth Jennings‘ poetry despite her established position in the world of

contemporary poetry. Inspite of several anthologies published by her, there is not a

single work that discusses the complete thematic significance or appreciates her

individual volumes. While the other Movement poets have been well received and

interpreted by critics and readers at large.

Though she is considered a minor poet, her considerable output merits

requires detailed and critical attention, and her youth allows time for growth in her

work.

Disclaimers by the Movement Poets:

The Movement of the 1950s and its survival has been quite debatable as the

poets and critics have expressed varied opinions about the Movement, its existence,

their participation in it and their connections to it. A look at these views will further

bring a clear understanding about the Movement and the controversies related to it.

Larkin, the representative of the group found: ‗no sense at all‘ in belonging to

a movement. (Hamilton 69).The historical perspective of the Movement was pointed

out by Wain. Describing the rebellious literary and social attitudes, he said: ―During

the First World War, a whole civilization had drifted to its death on a tide of oratory,

and the survivors, when at last they took their pens, were scornful of the overblown

and crenellated preferring a style that said what it meant in a down to earth fashion‖

(Morrison 5). Wain was, in real sense opposed to that generation of poets who chose

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their epithets with a view to sending up the emotional temperature of the poem, rather

than conveying the meaning. The new style was itself not new after all, but one that

selected several characteristics from previously existing literary habits and style and

tone.

Kingsley Amis referred to the Movement as the: ‗phantom movement‘ in an

essay written in 1950 (4). Playing unawareness about the existence of the Movement

and his association with it Thom Gunn said: ―I found I was in it before I knew it

existed and I have a certain suspicion that it does not exist‖ (6). D.J. Enright, another

renowned Movement poet, also shared the similar view when he said: ―I don‘t think

there was a movement back to those days, or, if there was, I don‘t know about it.‖ ( 4)

Elizabeth Jennings was likewise tending to play down the idea of the

Movement among a particular generation of postwar poets and in this reference she

says: ―They may have common aims - but this is something very different from that

deliberate practice and promulgation of shared views which a true literary movement

implies.‖ (10) Further she argues that: ―it is the journalists, not the poets themselves,

who have created the poetic movements of the Movements‖ (10).Talking about the

poetry of the fifties and the Movement in her book Let’s Have some Poetry (1960)

Jennings herself says that: ―What is certain, however, is that there are no such things

as poetic ―schools‖ or poetic ―movements‖ today, much as many critics would like to

think so. A real literary movement is one in which poets quite deliberately group

themselves together and issue a manifesto of their aims and allegiances. There are

always of course in any period, poets who have common interests and a common

attitude towards writing verse. Further she refers to the Movement poets who care for

form and clarity rather than being obscure. But she adds that each one of them is a

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personal poet with his own private preoccupations and difficulties‖ (Jennings, Lets

Have Some Poetry 104).

Conquest has claimed that, in editing New Lines: ―he was not trying to

assemble a movement‘, and since the draft of his introduction to the anthology

contained criticism of the Movement, his claim clearly has some justification‖

(Conquest, New Lines 87). Only Davie has acknowledged the Movement‘s existence

and his participation in it, but even he has belittled its importance. His essay

―Remembering the Movement‖ in 1959 contains some of the most of the informed

and insightful criticism about the Movement.

Controversies Regarding the Movement by the Critics:

Not only the Movement poets express their controversies on the Movement

but many critics have also expressed their ideas on the same. Anthony Thwaite calls

the Movement ‗a complex phenomenon‘ and raises a question: ―Was it a true literary

beginning in the 1950s or an invocation by journalists?‖ (Thwaite 40 ). Further Jeff

Nuttall describes it a ‗gigantic confidence trick; Howard Sergeant calls the Movement

an ―extremely well-mannered, not to say well-established, publicity campaign‖

(Morrison 3).Christopher Logue also dismissed it as a conspiracy by which fame-

seeking poets ‗presented themselves by means of a group name.‘ (3)

Further the Movement‘s political caution can be found in Robert Hewison‘s

well-documented account of the post-war years, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War

1945-60 (1981), Hewison reminds us in a comic tone that: ‗the movement did not

exist‘. He believed that it was an effective piece of stage management but he himself

cannot avoid using the label (Hewison 86).His essential point is that the attitudes of

the Movement poets reflects the restrictive conditions of the Cold War. The
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neutrality, caution and self-limitation of these writers belong to the mood of fear and

suspicion created by the continuing opposition among military and diplomatic forces

of East and West after 1945. In this reference he comments that: ―The cold war

tended to freeze public attitudes, and counseled silence about the private ones. It

recommended a guarded private life, in which only small gestures were possible,

gestures chiefly about the difficulty of making a gesture. Hence the concern of the

Movement poets was with the problems of perception and express.‖ (22) As Hewison

points out, literary history alone does not provide an enough account for what

prompted the Movement and determined the kind of poetry it looked for. It was part

of postwar social formation where heightened rhetoric and heightened emotion were

likely to be regarded as suspicion.

In spite of the attempts to degrade the Movement and to challenge its

existence, some major critics and writers like Jerry Bradley and Blake Morrison‘s

views show that the Movement identity of the poets is not as random as it is often

thought to be. In his book The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the1950s

Blake Morrison asserts not only that the Movement existed but that it was a literary

group of substantial importance (Morrison 60).

If the Movement did not exist as a rational literary group, it certainly operated

as a noteworthy cultural influence; it was a product of specific views about literature

and society, which in turn it helped to establish and circulate. Those critics who have

disputed the idea of the Movement as a well organized group with a clear and

consistent programme of ideas have nevertheless recognized among its supposed

members a shared set of values and suppositions intimately related to the moods and

conditions of postwar England.

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 Neil Corcoron goes so far as to assert that the preference for traditional forms

and methods was a part of determined effort to rebuild the intellectual culture of the

postwar years. She argues that: ―Syntax, measure and a logic of statement were, in the

Movement poem, almost an act of postwar reconstruction: to build the decorous shape

of the poem was to provide a defense against barbarism‖ (Corcoran 83).

In Antony Hartley‘s view ‗the return to romanticism which came between was

essentially a sport‘. Hartley does not consider the new movement to be a school of

poets with a definite programme and manifesto, but there is evidence, he argues: ―that

the present generation has been sufficiently affected by common influences and

circumstances for not too vague a zeitgeist to be apparent in their productions‖

(Hartley 8). Poets of the Fifties is perhaps the unique and the most useful description

of the Movement as it was perceived in its own time. Hartley goes some way towards

explaining the characteristic features of the new poetry: ―It might roughly be

described as ―dissenting‖ and non-conformist, cool, scientific and analytical…the

poetic equivalent of liberal, dissenting England‖ (Hartley 8).It is here that the

Movement ideology is first identified. The importance of Hartley‘s early review is

that it acknowledges the political and cultural contours of a dominant literary

tendency in postwar England.

J.D. Scott actually gave the name to the Movement by capitalizing it in his

Spectator article ―In the Movement‘‘. He agrees that: ― The English literary scene has

not been transformed in such a way since the 1930s, and contrasts the social, political

and moral consciousness of that age with seeming of the 1950s, consciousness of that

age with a lost idealism and in terms of a vigilant readjustment to an unsettled

postwar ironic England: The Movement, as well being anti-phoney, is anti-wet;

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skeptical, robust ,ironic, prepared to be as comfortable in a wicked, commercial,

threatened world which doesn‘t look, anyway, as if it‘s going to be changed much by

a couple of handfuls of young English writers‖ (Scott 400).

The anthology which had the greatest impact and which was held to be the

most representative of the Movement was Robert Conquest‘s New Lines (1956).It was

Conquest‘s introduction to the anthology which was largely responsible for

encouraging the idea of a reaction against the excesses of 1940s romanticism. He

argued that the poets of that decade were encouraged to produce diffuse and

sentimental verbiage (Conquest, New Lines 14-15).

Conquest shows little concern for the social and historical circumstances of

Postwar England and instead resorts to dubious cultural metaphors of sickness and

health. According to him: ―The 1940s attitude to poetry induced a sort of corruption;

it led to rapid collapse of public taste, from which we have not yet recovered‖

(Conquest, New Lines 13).The poetry of the 1950s, however, represents ‗a new and

healthy general standpoint…the restoration of a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry‘.

(12-14) .Conquest‘s bombastic description of the new poetry is frequently cited as a

manifesto for the Movement poets: ―If one had briefly to distinguish this poetry of the

fifties from its predecessors, I believe the most important general point would be that

it submits to no great systems of the – oretical constructs nor agglomerations of

unconscious commands‖ (59). Conquest seems to be saying here is that the poetry of

the 1950s is distinguished by its anti-dogmatic ideals, by a kind of aesthetic purity and

philosophical detachment and aloofness. There is an obvious disregard for the poetry

of the 1930s in his dig at ‗theoretical constructs ‗but the principal target would seems

to be Dylan Thomas.

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 One of the assessments of the Movement poetry can be found in Rule and

Energy by John Press (1963).According to him the new poets ‗advance no systematic

theory of poetry and offer no rigid set of dogmatic beliefs‘, but it is possible to

summarize the main characteristics of their work: ―They all display a cautious

scepticsim, favour an empirical attitude, speak in carefully measured accents, and

examine a problem with an alert wariness…‖ (Press 67). Here Press is just not

referring to a reaction against the ‗neo-romanticism‘ of the 1940s but to the whole

trend of English poetry since the early nineteenth century. The Movement poets, in

this respect are seen to represent a new ‗classicism‘ in English poetry. Yet it is clear

throughout Rule and Energy that this disbelieve of exaggerated rhetoric and large

emotional gestures is only one aspect of a much broader postwar tendency. Press

claims that the most outstanding characteristic feature of English poetry in these years

is: ―the general retreat from direct comment on or involvement with any political or

social doctrine‖ (Press 68).

In 1980 Blake Morrison‘s first complete study of the Movement, projected

that it was ‗a literary group of considerable importance‘, as central to the 1950s.The

great strength of Morrison‘s book lies in its sharp analysis of class and culture in the

postwar years. Morrison alleged that the Movement writers were known by their

contemporaries with a spirit of change in postwar British society and were thought to

be representative of shifts in power and social structure. They were seen to have

benefitted from the new opportunities made available to the lower-middle and

working classes and were consequently regarded by some members of the ruling class

as a risk to the old order. Morrison believes that Movement writers were very far from

rebellious, humbly submissive and often given to compromise and conservatism.

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 These views and comments cannot be imprecisely discharged but must be

treated with skepticism. A dislike for sensational journalism can be detected in the

Movement‘s critics, a slender view is taken by some in a sense that the only bonafide

movement is one in which all poets gather and others seem symptomatic of dislike of

being associated with any group activity. Most of the disavowals were made in the

late 1950s and early 1960s when the writers were commencing to move in diverse

directions and wanted their individual talents to be known. Movement poets seem

sometimes to be writing against their natural impulse in order to adhere to the group

principles and they have also given their consent to it. There were certain

contradictions too but at least for a time being there was considerable agreement and

interaction that was developed by the Movement harmony and consensus.

OBJECTIVES:

 Studying English poetic phenomenon called the Movement.

 By studying Jennings trying to understand the sole woman contributor to the

Movement.

 To create a new understanding about the unappreciated poetry of Jennings by

detailed study and analysis of her poems.

 To re-evaluate another significant poetic genre called Confessional poetry in

the light of Jennings works.

 To critically evaluate the trajectory of Elizabeth Jennings‘s career as a poet

within canon of English poetry.

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HYPOTHESES:

The hypotheses for this research are as under:

 A study of English poetry of the Movement enables us with an understanding

of post Second World War English poetry.

 A Study of the Movement has primarily been male centered and studying

Elizabeth Jennings‘s poetry would add the missing dimensions to it.

 Studying Elizabeth Jennings poetry makes us re-evaluate confessional poetry.

 Elizabeth Jennings‘s poetry underlines the significance of re-emergence of

women‘s poetic voice in England and America in post Second World War

period.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

This research project aims at exploring the diversity in Elizabeth Jennings poetry in

unity of Movement poets. The format of the thesis will be as under:

Chapter 1: Twentieth Century British Poetry up to the Movement.

Chapter 2: The Movement – An Assessment and Elizabeth Jennings in and out of the

Movement.

Chapter 3: Elizabeth Jennings‘ Poetry: Life, Works, Themes, forms and the

Development as a Poet.

Chapter 4: Redefining Confessional Mode in Jennings‘s Poetry and Autobiographical

Poems in Extending the Territory.

Chapter 5: The Strain of Romantic Poetics in Jennings‘s Moments of Grace and

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 Celebrations and Elegies

Chapter 6: Christian Religious Experience and Art in the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings

Chapter 7: Elizabeth Jennings as a Woman Poet

Chapter 8: Conclusion

Chapter 9: Selected Bibliography

Appendices

DETAILED CONTENTS OF EACH CHAPTER:

Chapter1 is entitled ―Twentieth Century British Poetry up to the Movement‖.

Being the introductory chapter it justifies the title of the thesis. Further it is followed

by the disclaimers and controversies regarding the Movement by the Movement poets

and critics, objectives of the research, hypotheses, methodology and detailed chapter

division. As Jennings in a 20th century British poetess the chapter discusses the broad

overview and background to Modern poetry, British poetry which includes Changing

British culture during the 1950s and 60s – its effects on poetry, Modern Poetry and

Modernism followed by the Rhymer‘s Club, Edwardians, Georgians, Imagists, First

World War Poetry which includes Pound, Eliot and Yeats as prominent figures.

Further the Poetry of the 30s, 40s and 50s is discussed. In the next section the eight

out of the nine Movement poets are discussed at length with the exception of

Jennings. She is discussed at length in Chapter 2.Lastly the key terms are defined with

the road map to the second chapter and finally the work cited follows.

Chapter 2 is entitled ―The Movement – An Assessment‖ and Elizabeth

Jennings in and out of the Movement‖.

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 The chapter includes the origin and development of the Movement, the

dispersal of the group, distinction between Modern and Movement poetry considering

the poetry of the 1940s followed by various points such as attachment with the

readers, form and content, politics, tradition, syntax attitude towards Christianity,

technique of predecessors, treatment of childhood,nature and hero, Englandism,

Provincialism and Londonism, themes and functions of poetry and finally the

characteristics of Movement Poetry are derived .

The second part of the chapter is Elizabeth Jennings: In and Out of the

Movement discusses Jennings relationship to the Movement. Her similarities and

differences with the group in terms of attitudes, sensibility, outlook and style help to

locate her and establish her position among her contemporaries. The similarities are

followed by Jennings‘ relationship to the Movement in terms of her association with

various literary groups and anthologies, middle class childhood of the Movement

poets and Jennings, the sense of an audience, the poetry of real and existential themes,

time and philosophy, poems with Georgian tendencies, common beliefs about the

professional employment of the poets, engagement with lyrics and landscapes in

Poems 1953 and the use of traditional verse forms. Her divergence from the

Movement includes her non use of irony and satire, impact of Christianity on

Jennings, her attitude to Romanticism, her association between madness and poetry,

contrast in treatment of themes, contrast in subjects of poetry and myth poems.

Chapter 3 ―Elizabeth Jennings poetry – Her Life, Works, Major Themes and

Forms and Development as a poet‖

As the title itself justifies this chapter looks into the birth and parentage of

Jennings and an outline of her works: the details of which are supported by her own

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Autobiography. Further it includes her approach towards poetry, influences on her

works, a study of the major poetic works, and the development of Elizabeth Jennings

as a poet. The chapter discusses at length the major themes and forms used by

Jennings. Prominent themes like love, death, religion, art, loneliness are discussed

with reference to poems from different anthologies. The second part of the chapter

looks at all of Jennings‘ Anthologies from the inception till the end with an emphasis

on major themes and forms used by her and it thus traces her development also.

Chapter 4 The title of the chapter is ―Redefining confessional mode in

Jennings poetry and autobiographical poems in Extending the Territory‖. Though

Jennings denies being a confessional poet there are confessional elements in her work.

This chapter looks into the various definitions of confessional poetry given by

different writers and critics against the poetry of Jennings. It looks at various

Jennings‘ poems and forms which follow the confessional mode. Further it discusses

the essay ―Towards a new Confessionalism: Elizabeth Jennings and Sylvia Plath‖ by

Jane Dowson and analyses various poems discussed in it. The second part of the

chapter ponders into the autobiographical poems of Jennings from the Anthology

Extending the Territory.

Chapter 5 is ―Christian Religious Experience and Art in the poetry of

Elizabeth Jennings‖ which includes the problems of definition and reception in

Christian Poetry, the problem and use of language in Christian Poetry, Elizabeth

Jennings: as a Christian Poet: art and religious experience poems on Christianity in

Consequently I Rejoice and finally the essays ―Elizabeth Jennings: An Exile in her

own Country‖, ―Poetry and Faith Example of Jennings Poetry‖ Sloan Barry, ―The

Misrule of our dust‖: Psychoanalysis, sacrament, and the subject in Elizabeth

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Jennings‘s poetry of incarnation‖ by Joseph Teller have been discussed to enrich the

chapter.

Chapter 6 is entitled ―The sway of Romantic Poetics in Jennings‘s Moments of

Grace and Celebrations and Elegies. Many critics have argued that Jennings

sensibility is Romantic compared to her anti-romantic peers. So the chapter looks into

the romantic aspects of her poetry especially with the poems in the above two

volumes. The chapter also draws throws light on the essay ‗Fond of What He’s

Crapping On’: Movement Poetry and Romanticism by Michael O’ Neill.

Chapter 7 ―Elizabeth Jennings as a Woman Poet‖ ponders into Jennings‘s

place in the history of Modern British poetry as a woman poet; evaluates the

definitions of poetry given by critics, it also looks at the factors responsible for the

neglect of woman‘s poetry, cross references from her autobiography and finally

discusses the essay ―There is Sweetness in Willing Surrender‖? Self-Loss and

Renewal in the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings, Kathleen Raine and Stevie Smith ‖ by

Jane Dowson.

Chapter 8 is the concluding chapter. It highlights all the aspects discussed in

the preceding chapters that make her stand out among her Movement contemporaries

in terms of her Catholic and Romantic outlook, confessional streak, and as a woman

poet and henceforth it justifies the title Diversity in Unity.

Chapter.9 is Bibliography which contains the Primary and Secondary sources

used in the dissertation.

To conduct the present research work on the poetry collections of Elizabeth

Jennings, the following methods will be followed: 1.The analysis and close reading of

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the poetry collections of Elizabeth Jennings. 2. Judicious use of books, journals and

articles of the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings. 3. Referring to the history of that period.

4. Consultation with the specialists in the area of Jennings poetry.5. Interview with

critics‘. Further, this Ph.D thesis will follow in documenting evidences and for other

scholarly purposes the rules mentioned in MLA Handbook for writers in Research

Papers, 7th edition, The Modern Language Association of America, 2016.

Twentieth Century British Poetry – An Introduction

During the 20th century, modern British poetry became more diverse and

wide-ranging moving away from the ―centre‖. It incorporated a wide variety of poetry

from Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and English-speaking countries overseas. As

the British Empire became slender and Britain‘s past colonies achieved freedom, the

new migrant populations began to develop their own cross-cultural, English Language

poetry using vernacular, slang or regional dialects. After the 1960s a growing number

of poets outside the mainstream got acknowledgment. Poets from different ethnic,

class and cultural backgrounds are now included in Contemporary English poetry.

Peter Finch in his article entitled ―British Poetry Since 1945‖ comments:―Since 1945

British Poetry has moved steadily from what many regard as twentieth century

parochial to a twenty-first century international‖( 1 ).

The twenties were the modernist years with a stress on experimentation with

form and freedom of subject matter and there was a watchful appropriation of poetry

to the uses of high culture during this decade. However with worldwide fascism on

the rise and the closeness of war and the coming of the economic depression, the

thirties, also called the Auden decade, threw up an urgent political poetry. The

―Macspaunday‖ supplied the poetic idiom appropriate to that decade, an idiom

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informed by public school Marxism and Freudian beliefs. When war broke out in

1939, the urge to warn which had characterized Auden‘s verse was no longer there.

The spectre of death and destruction was principal in the public mind and the forties

needed a new poetic idiom which was supplied by Dylan Thomas, the Apocalyptic

poets and the poets of the Celtic Renaissance. Their Neo-Platonic poetry of visionary

intensity and thundering rhythms fulfilled a religious need and affirmed life amidst

death and decay and disintegration. But poetry after 1945 changed and kept velocity

with developments in society, with the zeitgeist. The name given to this general

propensity after the war was the Movement, which one Oxford undergraduate called:

―the only Zeitgeist literature we have‖ (Morrison 6).

Changing British Culture: Major Events in the 1950s-60s and its effect on

Poetry:

Clement Atlee replaced the wartime leader and national hero Winston

Churchill in 1945. The labor party took office with a parliamentary mass for the first

time in British history, a majority which would allow out applying with obstacle, its

socialist policies. The building of a Welfare State was a top main concern. Atlee in As

it Happened wrote:

The Labor years Party came to power with a well defined policy worked out

over many years. It has been set out very clearly in our Election Manifesto

and we are determined to carry it out its ultimate objective was creation of a

society based on social justice, and, in our view, this could only be attained by

bringing under public ownership and control the main factors in the economic

system. (Kaufman 21)

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 The urge to build a new society, to demolish reforms of the older capitalist

system, to progress towards a democratic socialism, created an innovative mood in

post-war British society. It was divergent to the irresponsible bohemianism, the

abundant loose emotionalism of the 40s and to the political obsession of the Marxist

30s.It demanded from people civic sense, politically accountable behavior and the

avoidance of extreme attitudes. The Middle Way, a book significantly written by the

Tory Harold Macmillan, is an apt account of the human values inherent in the

democratic socialism of the Labor party and points to a great accord in political life in

Britain and after war. Aneurin Bevan a builder of Welfare State defined the political

temper of the new society in In Place of Fear, as ―essentially cool.‖ He asserted that

Democratic Socialism saw ―society in its context with nature‖ and was intensely

aware of the confines imposed upon human activity by physical conditions. Since it

saw ―the individual in his context with society‖ it was ―therefore compassionate and

tolerant.‖ Since it knew that all political action implied choice from several possible

alternatives its attitude was one of avoiding any ―absolute prescriptions and final

decisions.‖ It obliges one to choose, and in tune with existential philosophy, in so

doing ―to bear the pains of rejecting what is not practicable or less desirable.‖ Bevan

asserted that:

Democratic socialism is a child of modern society and so of relativist philosophy. It

seeks the truth in any given situation, knowing all the time that if this be pushed too

far it falls into error. It struggles against the evils that flow from private property, yet

realizes that all forms of private property are not necessarily evil. Its chief enemy is

vacillation, for it must achieve passion in action of the pursuit of qualified judgments.

It must know how to enjoy the struggle, whilst recognizing that progresses not the

elimination of struggle but rather a change in its terms. (Foot 13-14)

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 The Welfare State shaped by Labour was the derivative of such apolitical

temper. Dalton was to take into the public sector the Bank of England and deal with

the financial position of the country. It was Shinwell‘s task to get the mines back to

work and deal with the problems of coal, gas, electricity, and to nationalize fuel and

power. Alfred Barnes was to nationalize transport and John Wilmot, iron and steel.

Bevan was to deal with the housing problem and he was to get a scheme ready for

National Health Service, and Griffiths had to bring forward a comprehensive scheme

of National Insurance. All this was done and in particular Britain became the society

for full employment. In this context Eric Heffer writes that Britain accepted:

―Keynesian concept of Government intervention in economic affairs to create and

maintain employment. With such policies the life of the mass of the people was

transformed.‖ (22)

This mood of hopefulness in building the nation after the destruction of war

also affected the literary men. The best literary manifestation of this middle of the

road, responsible and civic political temper, was the Movement which provided an

idiom of decorum, judgment, modest intentions, clarity and form to match the new

social mood. The poetry of the period thus can be looked as having the following

traits: Rising importance of regional working class poets, ironic comment on the

theme of national decline: e.g. Larkin‘s ―Homage to a Government‖, loss of belief in

social alternatives like communism or nationalism, loss of belief in organized

religion: e.g. Ted Hughes, Crow poems, poetry commenting on the War years: e.g.

Donald Davies‘s, ―Eight Years After‖ (Hiroshima), Sylvia Plath‘s ―Daddy‖ (Jewish

Holocaust),political satire comments on the rise of capitalism and consumerism: e.g.

Peter Porter, A Consumers Report; Michael Hamburger, ―The Soul of Man under

Capitalism‖, ―Fear of Nuclear War‖: E.g. ―Peter Porter‖ and ―Your Attention Please‖,

21
redefinition of British National Identity: Displacement, loss of traditional beliefs and

the problem of replacement and redefining Britain in geographical and social terms:

industrialization, urbanization, rural life/geography/legend/industry.

Modern Poetry:

Modernism:

As a concept, ‗modernism‘ is easier to employ than to define. In its broadest

sense it refers to the innovation in literature and also to the essential re-making of all

the arts that went on in Europe and America in the years before 1914.As an attempt to

describe some salient features of modernism in fiction and poetry one can suggest the

following: nothing can be taken for granted in literary form; there must be no

unthinking imitation of what is already common, conscious aesthetic concentration is

essential; our insights of reality are essentially unsure and temporary; the unparallel

complication of modern world must be reproduced in literary form; supposedly

primitive myths can help us to grasp and order the chaos of twentieth century

experience; the intense but isolated ‗image‘ or ‗moment‘ or ‗epiphany‘ provides our

truest sense of the nature of things; the unconscious life of the mind is as important as

the conscious ; ‗personality‘ is precarious and fragmentary rather than substantial and

unchanging; disagreements in experience can be accommodated in literature by the

techniques of combination; literary works can never be given a final or absolute

interpretation. These characteristics can be found mostly in all modernist writers.

The years 1910 to 1930 form one of the richest periods in English literary

history compared to the end of 16th century or the beginning of the 19th.There is

foreseeable tension and contradiction between seeing literature as separate works of

varying degrees of excellence, and seeing it as schools and movements where one
22
speaks of progress from decadence to renewal. It is just not academic habit to discuss

something so various as literature in these collective terms; the very process to think

coherently seems to enforce them. The early years of modernism provide an instance

of ‗paradigm shift‘ which changes the very nature of a subject and its possibilities and

limitations changes radically. Similar to this shift began happening to aesthetic

perception in about 1910,which is what Virginia Woolf was trying to imply by saying

that human character changed in that year.

One of the most extreme and innovative of continental schools of modernism

was Italian Futurism, led by F.T. Marinetti. Futurism wanted a total break with the

past in poetry, painting, and music. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and D.H.

Lawerence were influenced by the Futurist theory and practice.

Anglophone modernism tended not to reject the past as such, but to reject the

recent past, the philistine and bourgeois nineteenth century in favor of remoter periods

of history, or a mythologized antiquity. Pound looked to the Province of the

Troubadours; T.S.Eliot found an ideal order in Dante and in 17th century England of

Donne and Herbert and Lancelot Andrews; James Joyce used Homer as a way of

ordering the chaos of modern existence; and Lawerence aspired to the pure primitive

consciousness of American Indians or ancient Etruscans.

After several years we are still living with modernist transformations of lyrical

poetry and the realistic novel, and they have not been surpassed or rendered obsolete.

Other arts can achieve a kind of permanent revolution by constantly changing their

material media, but literature can never free itself from its traditional medium, words,

which have a built in bias towards continuity.

23
 Furthermore, modernism did not affect the whole of literature. Some major

writers such as Hardy and Kipling were unaffected by it and another historical

consideration is that most of the earliest modernist writers were not English. James,

Pound and Eliot were American, Wyndham Lewis was half- American; Conrad was

Polish; Yeats and Joyce were Irish, as were Wilde and Shaw, who though not

modernists were cultural subverters; Ford was half –German. Virginia Woolf was

certainly English but she did not share all the values and assumptions of the English

professional classes. The unfamiliar ethnic and cultural background of the modernist

writers does emphasize their innovative significance; in literary genetic terms the

cross- fertilization was clearly helpful.

Definitions of Modernism:

Mathew Arnold used the term ‗modern‘ in his lecture of 1857, entitled On the

Modern Element in Literature. For him: ―the modern implied repose, confidence,

tolerance, the free activity of the mind winning new ideas in condition of material

well-being; ―it involved the willingness to judge by reason and search for the law of

things‖ (Malcom 41).

But modern has obtained a different connotation in the context of the

twentieth century poetry. The twentieth century ‗modern‘, postulates a set of contrary

ideas. As Lionel Trilling points out, it is nihilism, hostility to civilization and

disenchantment with culture itself. Modernism which we refer to is the modernism

pertaining to English and American poetry and it was French symbolism that gave it

impetus. In fact it was a movement that covered the first three decades of the

twentieth century, and its exponents were not only Yeats, Eliot, Pound and Joyce but

also Valery, Rilke, Proust and Stravinsky.

24
 Alvarez pinpoints 1920s as the real modern period with Eliot and Pound as the

epicenter. He also remarks that symbolist and post-symbolist poets also lay claim to

the title ‗modern‘. Frank Kermode speaks of pale-modernism and neo-modernism, the

former concerned with the revolution staged by Pound and Eliot and the latter with

the high experimentalists of the present time.

C.S. Lewis in his Lecture at Cambridge in 1954, De Description Temporm

declares that modern poetry is not only a greater novelty than any other ‗new poetry‘

but new in a way, almost in a ‗new dimension‘. His implication is that modern poetry

is a complete break with the past.

T.E. Hulme in a Lecture on Modern Poetry asserts that: ―the modern is the

exact opposite of old poetry, it no longer deals with heroic action, it has become

definitely and finally introspective and deals with expression and communication of

momentary phases in the poet‘s mind‖ He tends to highlight the subjective phases in

the poet‘s mind and the subjective and psychological aspects of modern poetry (James

65).

Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane observe that modern embraces

impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism, symbolism,

imagism, vorticism and cubism. Modernism was an astonishing compound of the

futuristic and the nihilistic, the revolutionary and the conservative, the naturalistic and

the symbolist, the romantic and the classical.

Monroe K. Spears in Dionysus and the City sums up modernism under four

categories (1) Metaphysical Discontinuity, which emphasizes the anti-romantic tenets

of man‘s break with nature (2) Aesthetic discontinuity, which means that art is

independent of life (3) Rhetorical discontinuity which implies the allegorical nature of
25
a poem with its lack of sequence in thought, and juxtaposition of images in a non-

rational order, and (4) Temporal discontinuity stressing the notion of spatial forms

and simultaneity.

Chris Baldick describes modernism as: ―Modernism is a general term, applied

retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant grade trends in literature

of the early 20th century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism,

Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism, along with the innovations of unaffiliated writers‖

(Baldick 140).

Trends in Modern Poetry:

Victorian Precursors:

The entire Victorian poetry cannot be condemned for romantic conventionality

and lack of adult male intelligence. It cannot be condemned as Pounds does, as a

messy, blurry period of eccentricity. The Catholic poets Patmore, Mrs.Maynell,

Hopkins and Thompson infused energy in poetry by reinforcing it with metaphysical

strand. Their poetry was marked by wit, play of intellect, stress of cerebral muscle.

They realized to a considerable extent the limits of individualism, and the need for

order and discipline.

The Rhymer’s Club:

The Rhymers' Club was a group of London-based poets founded in 1890

by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys. Originally not much more than a dining club, it

shaped anthologies of poetry in 1892 and 1894. Their meeting place was at the

London pub ‗Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese‘ in Fleet Street and in the 'Domino Room' of

the Café Royal.

26
 The poets of the Rhymer‘s Club at the end of the century responded to the

influence of the French Symbolism. Dowson and Lionel Johnson took the clue from

Mallarme in aiming to create a new poetic language by means of an intense

cultivation of the inner life. The sense of isolation of the poet and the concomitant

melancholy which characterize their poetry are integral to the poetry of Pound and

Eliot. Their works along with Arthur Symons awakened English poetry to foreign

influences. Arthur Symons anticipates Eliot in his fascination for London street

scenes. Eliot has expressed his debt to John Davidson who explored the stoical world

of a small clerk hanging on to respectability in his Thirty Bob a Week. He linked

many current tendencies, skepticism, patriotism, local pride, impressionism with a

new mood of revolt. William Henley was a pioneer of the new realism in English

poetry. In Hospital he conjures up the image of a hospital which is a symbol of the

sick modern world and the preoccupation with science. It anticipates Eliot‘s East

Coker.

De Sola Pinto in his Crisis In English Poetry observes that: ―These poems are

perhaps the final resolute attempt to use ugliness, meanness and pain as subjects of

poetry‖ (Pinto 12) .He finds images in the kind of ugliness peculiar to the modern

world. He tried to create a free verse which would express by its movement the

restlessness and spiritual disintegration of the modern world. Here again he

anticipated Eliot, but he lacked intellectual and emotional maturity.

Edwardians:

Thomas Hardy (1804-1928) though a Victorian poet wrote great poetry

evincing an intense concern, as F. R. Leavis in New Bearings in English Poetry

remarks that: ―with the human situation as it appeared in the light of modern thought

27
optimistic or sentimental evasions or insincerities were alien to him. He inhabits a

solid world, with the earth firm under his feet. He knows what he wants, what he

values and what he is He feels deeply and consistently, and communicates perfectly

(Leavis 34). For instance in ―I look into my glass‖, he says that on looking into the

mirror he sees his body shrunk and decayed, but his regret is that his heart has not

shrunk like his body. In the second stanza, he could ―lonely wait my endless rest/with

equanimity,‖ undistressed by the indifference or death of those who once loved him.

A great deal of Hardy‘s poetry arises out of the perception of beauty in ugliness. He

sought to expand the boundary of sensibility by perceiving beauty and significance in

the ugly and the commonplace.

Robert Bridge‘s (1844 - 1930) short poems assign him to the Victorian period

but his long philosophical Testament of Beauty poem brings him into twentieth

century. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) a conservative imperialist wrote verses that

could be set to music and publicly recited. His poems Road to Mandaly and If

belong to this type.

Chesterson wrote Rumbustations and Sonorous verse. Sir Henry Newbolt

(1862-1968) was also endowed with the gift of writing poems for recitation. His Song

of the Fleet includes Drake’s Drum and other verses which suited for declamation.

Georgians:

The poetry which is termed ‗Georgian‘ takes its name from the King (George

V) who reigned from 1910 to 1936, but in effect it covers a much shorter period.

Linda R. Williams‘s comments on Georgianism: ―Georgianism perhaps epitomises

the popular notion of English Poetry-parochial, solid, univonic, celebrating English

28
rural life, particularly the home Countries Variety. Its importance lies in the way it

fed into the poetry Of World War I‖ (Williams 65).

Georgians comprises of the poets like Abercrombie, Robert Graves, Rupert

Brooke, J. C. Squire, W. H. Davies and Edward Thomas. The important traits in

Georgian poetry are:

1. A scholarly tradition going back through Tennyson and Wordsworth to Milton

and Elizabethans refining the old themes.

2. A Catholic Movement with affinities to the ‗Metaphysicals‘ and other

religious poets.

3. An ‗aesthetic‘ tendency indebted to the Pre-Raphaelites with a romantic

nostalgia and interested in verbal suggestion manifested through symbolism.

4. A tendency to realistic impressionism arising from an imaginative approach to

city life.

5. A ‗naturalistic‘ approach to simple life of countryside, sea and open road, with

a predilection for romantic natural imagery.

Imagists:

After the Georgians the imagist movement had a brief existence from 1909,

and it came to an end with the death of T. E. Hulme in the war in 1917. The members

of the movement were T. E. Hulme, the presiding philosopher of the movement, F. S.

Flint, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. The term ‗Imagistic‘ was invented by Ezra

Pound. The movement was international in character, comprising Englishman and

Americans. Imagist poems tend to be short glimpses, which contrasts with the

lushness of Romantic and Victorian verse. It was a movement designed to replace the

‗soft‘, discursive narrative voice of Victorian verse with a harder, more condensed,

29
imagistic language. James Joyce was among the contributors to the first anthology

and D. H. Lawrence‘s poetry can frequently be considered Imagist, although he was

not directly associated with the group.

T. E. Hulme in his essay ―Romanticism and Classicism‖ (1913-14) raised the

battle cry that after hundred years of Romanticism, we are in for the revival of

classicism. He denounced Romanticism as vague and confused. He points out that

romanticism is dead in reality, but the critical attitude appropriate to it still remains.

The main principles laid by him are:

1. There is no such thing as ―poetic‖ subject matter. The aim is accurate, precise

and definite description. Fancy would be proper faculty to produce the

cheerful, dry and sophisticated verse.

2. Poetry is a matter of images and metaphors. Images in verse are not

decoration, but the very essence of intuitive language.

3. The business of the poet is not personal expression but craft. The proper aim

of the poet sis to get the exact curve of what he sees, whether it can be an

object or an idea in the mind.

4. The complexity with which poetry deals is not mechanical but organic. Each

part of the poem is modified by the presence of the other and each to a certain

extent is a whole. In the context of imagist poetry, C. K. Stead observes:

―Imagist poetry developed as a way of presenting sharp visual Perceptions in

lines which preserved the emotional experience by a rigid Exclusion of all

elements of discourse‖ (Stead 84).

First World War Poetry:

30
 At the beginning of the First World War the characteristic response to it was

that to serve in the war was a matter of duty. Poetry was written in order to express a

sense of honor and to celebrate the glories of war. Rupert Brooke writes in his poem

―The Soldier‖: ―If I should die, think only this of me: That there‘s some corner of a

foreign field /That is forever England‖ (Larkin, The Oxford Book of Twentieth

Century English Verse, 213).This poem is a romantic sonnet and is patriotic which

celebrates the values of the liberal culture of Brooke and his contemporaries which

sees death as a sacrifice.

Wilfred Owen who came to maturity during the War found in the very heart of

the battle his inspiration and subject matter. In a preface to his poems, he declared:

―My subject is War and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity‖ (220) .All his best

poems are informed with this pity, a pity controlled by a highly sensitive irony.

The important war poets are Sir William Watson, Henry New-Bolt, Sorely,

Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon. The first two are chauvinistic; the others are sensitive

to the misery and sufferings brought about by the war. The horrors of the First World

War marked the end of a phase of Western European Liberal Culture. In four years,

1914 to 1918, over nine million lives were lost in Europe, the British Commonwealth,

and the U. S. A. Profound psychological injuries were caused in the minds of the

survivors and a physical and metaphysical wasteland was created across Europe. This

despair was reflected in the poetry of these years.

Ezra Pound:

In any account of development of modernism in England the name of Ezra

Pound is bound to be prominent. He is important as a poet and critic, and as a cultural

impresario, who liberally encouraged painters and sculptors and musicians as well as
31
writers even when his resources were very limited. Pound made a major contribution

to English literature by helping to launch Joyce and Eliot when they were unknown.

Ezra Pound‘s critical theories are evolved with an eye on the kind of modern

poetry which he writes. He considers 19th century romanticism as messy, blurry and

idiosyncratic. He had a sure sense of how English poetry might be enriched by other

poetries, in a long tradition including Rossetti, Wyatt and Chaucer. Pound returned to

English poetry a confidence, which was commonplace in medieval and Renaissance

culture but suppressed by Romantic individualism, that poetry is made as much from

other poetry as from subjective feelings. He thinks that in poetry, every word is as

hard as bone and has significance and a particular function. There is no space for idle

ornament or mechanical irrelevant rhythm. Form and experience is co-terminus. Ideal

poetry has the simplicity of good prose. He advocates ideographic method which

poetry must use and this process involves metaphors and material images to suggest

immaterial relation. He emphasizes visual concreteness, clarity, impersonality and

avoidance of description his two well – known poems Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and

Cantos began about the same time. The former is a long poem, portraying the

decadence and isolation of the poet in modern commercial society it is an account of

Pound‘s own isolation by means of a persona. He bids good-bye to England as it has

been indifferent to him and his art. Go lovely rose is ‗modern‘ in its rhythmic

variation and in the character of its thought. The Cantos have epic dimension and is a

mixture of the opposites with fact and fiction: ―the natural and the supernatural, life

and death, human experience and dream of the divine‖. Further ―Its method of

presentation is based on symbolist; Imagist and stream of consciousness techniques.‖

(Rengachari 9). The Cantos brings within the frame work of 20th century imagination

diverse phases of history belonging to oriental and occidental regions.

32
 Pound is widely credited as the inventor of ‗Imagist‘ poetry. He invented the

name and in 1912 he set up school of Imagist poets, consisting of himself and two

friends, Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle.

T. S. Eliot:

The ruins created across Europe as a result of the First World War entered the

world of Eliot‘s poetry. The Wasteland, published in 1922 depicts a cultural and

spiritual wasteland, a land populated by people who are, physically and economically,

living a kind of death in the minds of their routine lives. This is reflected in the lines:

―A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many I thought death had undone so many‖

(Larkin, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse 228 ).

The people move across a desolate landscape of fragmented images; they do

not relate to one another. The many different voices we hear in the poem speak not to

each other but past each other. Eliot sees the root of the modern world‘s unhappiness

and alienation in the fact that people are unable to bring together the different areas of

their experience to make a complete whole. Their social, sexual and religious

experiences are fragmentary and not unified.

The Wasteland scrutinizes the grand dualism of beauty and ugliness and finds,

in the critic and poet I. A. Richard‘s words: modernity‘s ―persistent concern with

sex,‖ (Williams Linda 70) which is then used as a lens through which history is seen

as the history of progressive wastage. Further talking about the poetry of modernity in

her essay Rule and Energy in View, Linda R. Williams‘ comments on The Wasteland:

The Wasteland re-reads history as a sordid parade witnessed by the bisexual

Tiresias who shuffles across its stage, and which climaxes in a series of

33
 sordid liaisons. Tiresias, an ―old man with wrinkled dugs‖, witness and for

tells the sterility of a heterosexual love. The desperate desire for, and the

impossibility of communication, is both as‘ truth‘ of sexual relations and of

Modernist writing. (70)

Eliot‘s poetry breaks drastically with much of the other poetry written during

these years. Like the war poets, he realized that the poetic idiom available to him was

tired and had to be changed. Different experiences needed diverse styles and uses of

language.His poetry was formally more experimental and innovative and

intellectually more thoughtful. Further, Ronald Carter and John McRae quote Eliot:

Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and

complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex

results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more

indirect, in order to force to dislocate if necessary into meaning.( 339)

This reveals Eliot‘s views on complex modern poetry of complex times.

Instead of the traditional lyric rhythms and conventionally beautiful and poetic images

of pre-war poets, Eliot uses images that shock and bewilder. They are images which

are original and novel, striking and obscure, drawn from a discordant urban rather

than a harmonious rural life. The three principal qualities which characterize Eliot‘s

work are:

First his particular sense of the age in which he lived; second his conviction

that poetry, although uses the poets emotions as its starting point, becomes

‗impersonalized‘ by the tradition in which the poet works; and third; his use of

quotations from and allusions to other poets work from reference, parody, irony and a

sense of continuing inter textual communication and community.

34
 Most of the poems in Eliot‘s first collection had been written before the war.

As Pound rightly saw, this work, and particularly The Love Song of J. Prufrock, had

established modern poetry in English. ‗Profrock‘ is ironic, discontinuous, imagistic,

frequently dissonant, and yet overall intensely melodic and memorable.

William Butler Yeats:

Yeast‘s poetry stretches across the whole period of late Victorian and early

modern ages. However, Yeats‘s poetry undergoes more marked changes during these

years than that of Hardy. Yeats‘s first poem was published in 1885 and he continued

writing until his death in 1939. There are three main stages to Yeats development as a

poet. The first phase, which he was associated with the Aesthetic movement of the

1890s and the Celtic Twilight, is characterized by a self- conscious Romanticism. The

poetry is sometimes based on Irish myth and folklore and has a mystical, dream like

quality to it.

The second main phase of Yeats poetic career was dominated by his

commitment to Irish nationalism which first sent Yeats in search for a consistently,

simpler, popular and more accessible style. As Yeats became more involved in public

nationalist issues, his poetry became more public and concerned with the politics of

modern Irish state. Yeats recognized that the causes of violence, disorder and

repression are complex and have to be confronted and understood. For example, his

poem ―The Second Coming‖ (1921) is a chilling vision of impending death and

dissolution: ―Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /Mere anarchy is loosed upon

the world‖ (Yeats 158).

There is a gaiety and celebration in Yeats poetry. Yeats developed an

elaborate symbolic system which is private to him, in certain particulars drawn from
35
traditions of obscure thought which almost compensated for a lost religion. But his

greatness as a poet lies in communicating both precisely and evocatively to readers

who may know nothing of his sources.

In the final phase of his career, Yeats reconciles elements from both his earlier

periods, fusing them into a mature lyricism. The poetry is less public and more

personal. He develops his theories of contraries and of progression which can result

from reconciling them, but he also writes about the eternity of art, producing in the

process many memorable poems which have come to be seen as having enduring

value.

The later poetry of Yeats became mature with the infusion of energy into it,

and the use of common idiom. The landmarks of his poetic progress are Adam’s

Curse (1902), Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914). His mature style,

violent and terrible, is fully evinced in the last mentioned work. Like Eliot, Yeats

created a modern idiom for poetry, particularly in merging formal and colloquial

styles. He is less ironic and less distrustful of Romanticism than Eliot.

Poetry of the 1930s

The thirties felt, and feel, different from the twenties. It is not merely that

already in 1930 the foundations were being laid for the Second World War. The rise

to power in Germany of Hitler and the Nazi party were cause for increasing anxiety,

but anxiety is the is not the sole characteristic of the decade .There went with it a

sense of release that at last the worst could be imagined, and beyond it something

better. ‗Today the struggle‘, wrote Auden in his stirring poem on behalf of the

Spanish republicans, putting off to tomorrow the pleasures very much in his mind at

that moment,: ―Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love; /The photographing of

potential in human life that makes the struggle worthwhile. Sometimes it seems that

the struggle is fun in itself.

For most of the writers and intellectuals in the thirties, the struggle was that

for a just society, and in its international aspect it was a fight against Fascism. This

was a highly political decade. The thirties fascination with politics was an aspect of its

youth. Especially in literature this was a time for the young. The twenties present an

image of a powerfully assured modern literature. Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Lawrence, a

refashioned Yeats, stand for the best in the writing of that decade. But Eliot was the

only one of these who lived in England itself; and since he had declared himself in

1928 ‗classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-catholic in religion‘ he had

lost his attraction as a model for the young, though without ceasing to command a

more or a less qualified respect from them.

Joyce‘s work is in progress, like Pound‘s was idiosyncratic, fragmentary as yet

and caviar to the intellectual general. Lawerence had died in 1930s, his last years‘

work marred by signs of haste and sickness; his exile had been intellectual as well as

physical. Yeats had yet to be recognized as, in his greatest poems, untrammeled by his

orthodox speculations in the spirit world. The First World War was producing its

harvest of memoirs and autobiographical fiction, but its survivors for most of the part

lived in their past. It was time for the empty citadel of literature to be taken once

again.

Poets of the 1930s are known as the New Country Group. They are Auden,

Spender, Louis, Macneice and Day. Lewis Roy Campbell labels them in a pejorative

manner as Macspaunday Group. Their poetry was a negative feed-back or a

37
retrograde movement, recoil from the real modern poetry of the 1920s. They have not

altogether escaped the influence of the past generation. They fastened to ideals and

founded their poetry on ideologies and were partisan in their outlook.

In the decade of the 1930s the skies contained both natural and manmade

objects – the hawk and the helmeted airman. The airman may be in a battle helmet,

his plane is likely to be a war-plane, and his actions are threatening the coming

decade. One of the tasks of the poet is to warn us to consider our times and be

prepared for appropriate action.

One of the main European political events of the 1930s which drew a response

from writers was the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). They felt that its result would

shape the future mainly since a second world war seemed close

Auden, Spender, Day Lewis and Mac.Neice wrote very much like writers of

their own time. They passionately cared about society and politics. Living at a time

when there was much unemployment and when a civil war was being fought in Spain

one or two of them aligned themselves with the Communist party, but their allegiance

to the party, as with many European writers, was an idealistic allegiance. They saw

Communism as the only answer to the evil and injustice of man to man. Since the real

evil at heart of Marxist Communism has now been revealed, they have withdrawn

their support of it. But in the thirties they were drawn to it because of the way in

which it seemed to resemble Christ‘s plea for love and justice, a plea which was

manifested in the Sermon on the Mount.

Apart their interest in politics, however, the thirties poets, particularly Auden

and Spender, took an intense delight in the machines and buildings of their own age –

in aeroplanes, railway engines, pylons and factories. Thus Spender wrote a poem

38
called ―The Landscape near the Aerodrome‖ in which he most skillfully combined a

deeply human compassion with an almost ecstatic delight in the inhuman power of

man-made aeroplane:

More beautiful and soft than any moth

With burning furred antennae feeling its huge path

Through dusk, the air- liner with shut off engines

Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall

To point the wind.Gently broadly she falls

scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.

(Spender 40)

Here the precision of words like ―blurring,‖ ―trailing,‖ and ―charted‖ is note

worthy and there is also remarkable vividness of the comparison between a moth and

the air-liner.

C.D.Lewis also appropriated imagery from the modern industrial world in a

sequence of poems called From Feathers to Iron .This sequence describes the

expectation and birth of a child and, while employing traditional lyric forms the poet

gives this forms a quite new power of making them contain entirely contemporary

images. So he uses the metaphor of a railway to express his delight at the coming of

his child: ― Here is love‘s junction, no terminus/ He arrives at girl or a boy./ Signal a

clear line and let us/ Give him the run of life: we shall get thus / A record of our

joy‖(Lewis 12).

W. H. Auden, the dominant poet of the 1930s was an omnivorous reader

whose range covered from Lewis Carrol to the psychology of Freud and to the

philosophy of Kierkegard. His poems of the thirties present powerful versions of the

emotion of simultaneous dread and joy that is the mark of the decade. At this time his

39
poems evoke a world of frontiers to be crossed, messages to be delivered guards to be

evaded, and loyalties to be affirmed: ―Control of the passes was, he saw, /the key to

this new district, but who would get it?/He, the trained spy, had walked into the

trap/For a bogus guide, seduced by the old tricks‖ (Auden 50).

Initially he was interested in the light verse, but beneath the surface of

lightheartedness lurked seriousness. There is an alliance of seriousness and levity in

such ballads as Miss Gee and James Honeyman. In 1937, Auden wrote a poem

entitled Spain in which he sees the war as a battle between good and evil forces. The

forces of evils are associated with fascism and the regime of the dictator General

Franco; the forces of good are associated with the Republican army which had the

support of the majority of the ordinary people of Spain. This poetry is noticeably

different from the poetry of the 1920s. Eliot‘s poetry explores a private condition;

Auden‘s poetry reflects a more public situation. Where Eliot searches for spiritual

solutions; for Auden social and political world cannot be separated. Eliot‘s use of

obscure language makes his poetry complex and he uses form and language to

communicate a more social perspective on the modern world. Both of them share the

same poetic quest for meaning to life amidst images of a contemporary world which

fail to form a coherent whole.

With Auden the language and impedimenta of his own time were absorbed

into his poetry at a deeper level, as it were, than was the case with any other poet of

the thirties. The modern symbols and analogies do not shine out of his poems like

great, glowing jewels; on the contrary, they seem an integral part of his poems. There

appears to be no inconsistency and no barrier between his poems and the world in

which he lives. Thus he can write a sonnet, like the one from which the opening lines

are quoted:

40
 A shilling life will give you all the facts:

How father beat him, how he ran away,

What were the struggles with his youth, what acts

Made him the greatest figure of his day:

Of how he fought , fished, hunted, worked all night,

Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea:

Some of the last researchers even write

Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

(Auden 44 )

In this poem there is an immense sense of psychology and psychiatry which

was shared by some of the best of the thirties poets but which had its most dominating

influence on the thought and poetry of Auden. Father with a capital Fin this sonnet is

a reference to the ―father – figure,‖ one of the most important ideas in the

psychological theories of Freud. The idea is wholly integrated with the rest of the

poem and does not stick out as an interruption.

The Poetry of the 1940s:

World War II was a watershed in British life and in Charles Causley‘s words;

―The signature of murder‖ (in ‗I saw a shot Down Angel‘) is scrawled across the

history of writing since the war. The prominent poets of the forties were Dylan

Thomas, George Barker, Henry Treece, George Gascoine etc.

The most famous ‗forties poet‘, Dylan Thomas, had produced much of his

most interesting and characteristic work before 1940. In 1934, Dylan Thomas‘s first

volume Eighteen poems, won wide spread acclaim. He was felt to be a poet who

41
could to restore to poetry in English a Romantic vigour and flamboyance after the

anxious, uncertain tones of Eliot, the more cautious Romanticism of W. B. Yeats and

the social preoccupation of W. H. Auden. Throughout his greatest poems there is an

intensity born out of struggle to give expression to very powerful feelings. Many of

his poems are dense in meaning and the images are frequently wild and surreal but his

tone is bold and affirmative. He consciously throws himself into a fierce alien

element. He wants words to seduce him; he wants to be possessed. As he was born

and brought up in Wales there is touch of Welsh traditions in matters of religion. He

writes with an elegiac appreciation of natural forces, the forces of birth, sex and death

and with a rhapsodic regret for all that is lost in death. In a famous poem of his dying

father, written in the form of a villanelle, Thomas urges him to resist: ―Do not go

gentle into the good night/ Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage

against the dying of light‖ (Thomas Dylan 48). Much of modern poetry continues

Dylan Thomas‘s affirmation of life over death, particularly poignant in the nuclear

age of post – war writing.

One of the positions of the 1940s poetry can be clarified through a statement

Thomas made about his attitude to the image in comparison with Pound‘s notion that

an Imagist image is : ―an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time‖

(Williams 68).Further she quotes: ―I let... an image be ‗made‘ emotionally in me and

then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess let it breed another let

that image contradict the first, make, of the third image breed out of the other two

together, a fourth contradictory image and let them all, within my imposed formal

limits conflict....‖ (69)

The Poetry of the 1950s – Movement Poetry:

42
 The poetic stage of the 1950s was dominated by a group of posts known as

Movement. The Movement boasts amongst its ranks such poets as Elizabeth Jennings,

Kingsley Amis, John Holloway, Philip Larkin, John Wain, Donald Davie, Thom

Gunn and Robert Conquest. Conquest, a lawyer in his collection of verses called New

Lines proclaimed its manifesto:

If one had briefly to distinguish this poetry of the fifties from its

predecessors, I believe the most important general point would be

that it submits to no great systems of the oretical constructs nor

agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both mystical

and logical compulsions and like modern philosophy is empirical, in its

attitude to all that comes. This reverence for the real person or event is,

indeed, a part of the general intellectual ambience of our time.

(Regan Stephen ―The Movement‖ 245)

Donald Davie a famous member of this group aims his hostile criticism at the

symbolist and the post symbolist traditions in poetry and criticism. The poet enters

into a tacit agreement with the public with the declaration that he will avoid an

esoteric language, use words in the sense with which the public is familiar and

employ traditional patterns of verse, easily intelligible to the public. He favors a

rational progression of thought and a logical structure. He seems to agree with Ivor

Winter‘s tenet that a poem is an organization of language with precise meaning of

words embodying a value and a judgment passed by the poet himself on it. Thus it can

be easily perceived that the Movement has staged a rebellion against the modern

poetry of 1920s, represented by Eliot and Pound. Philip Larkin, the illustrious poet of

the Movement declares that he has been most influenced by the poetry which he has

43
enjoyed- that of Hardy, Owen, Christina Rossetti and Auden. He rejects the ‗myth

kitty‘ business of Eliot. He says: ―I have no belief in tradition, or a common myth

kitty or casual allusions in a poem to other poems or poets‖ (Larkin, Required Writing

20).

The Group:

The Movement is followed by the Group which consists of George Macbeth,

Ted Hughes, Philip Hobsbaum, Redgrove and Levenson come under the influence of

Leavis and hence held on to the tenets of concreteness. The Group considers the

poetry as owing a great deal to cooperative criticism aims at an intellectual audience.

Both the Movement and the group have the Wordswordian ideal that the poet is a men

speaking to men.

The Movement Poets:

The careers of the Movement poets have been long but the following section

on the Movement poets discusses them in relation to their roles played in the

Movement, their views, attitudes and their relationship to the Movement and the other

poets of the group. These poets have no poetic program but their pronouncements on

poets and poetry have an astounding similarity of viewpoint and attitude. At one time

it might have been suggested that they shared certain qualities, yet every one of them

has its own poetic character which results from his especial approach to his subjects.

An attempt has also been made to look at the similarities between the poetry of two

poets wherever possible. The differences between these poets are more substantial

than the similarities because they involve the very process of their making of their

poetry. As a matter of fact, their poetic strategies are the outcome of their individual

attitudes towards experience, tradition and life in general.

Poetry in the chapters ―A Group Disperses‖ and ―Poetry in the Fifties‖ discusses

about the Movement poetry and poets which have been included here. All eight

Movement poets except Jennings have been included here. Jennings has been looked

at in depth in further chapters.

Philip Larkin:

Larkin is the representative poet of the Movement. Being influenced by Yeats

and Auden in his early career he soon shook off romanticism. He liked Hardy for his

realistic strain in his view to be refused to be deceived by any romantic dreams.

Inspired by Hardy he writes of the loss of the communal life that had stimulated the

writers of the past. Larkin‘s work exhibits the blend of technical formalism and

conversational diction characteristic of the Movement. He was practical and tough

minded and avoided lofty rhetoric preferring a lyrical simplicity that post war readers

found attracted. He displays a full command over his material and form. According to

him form and content are indivisible. The use of memorable endings, double

negatives, compound adjectives participles and beautiful handling of details, recurrent

imagery are the dominant characteristics of his verse. His major poetry collections

include The Northship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High

Windows.

According to Amis : ―Larkin always knew where he stood, never fooled

himself or said anything he did not mean; when he told you he felt something , you

could be quite he did feel it –a priceless asset to a poet , and a poet of feeling and

mood at that. The same quality assured that when he had nothing to say he said

45
nothing, a turn of mind that helped him not to write any bad poems‖ (Amis, Memoirs

58).

His childhood was largely uneventful and his recollection of it ―I Remember, I

Remember‖ lacks all sentimentality. There is little attachment to the past. Larkin

demystifies the upbringing and concludes: ―nothing like something happens

everywhere‖ (Larkin, Collected Poems 34). He traveled little .His father took him to

Germany once, a trip that spawned in him a hatred of all foreign travel: ―not being

able to talk to anyone, or read anything…..I wouldn‘t mind seeing China.‖he wrote,

―if I could come back the same day……..I think travelling is very much a novelist‘s

thing…..The poet is really engaged in recreating the familiar‖(Larkin, Required

Writing 47-55).

Like Donald Davie and John Wain, he objected to the ―cunning merger

between poet, literary critic and academic critic. He never married and his poetry

expresses considerable bewilderment about the prospects of sexual happiness and

wedded bliss as he says: ―I don‘t want to sound falsely naïve, but I often wonder why

people get married. I think perhaps they dislike being in love is a very difficult

business anyway because almost by definition it means putting yourself at the

disposal of someone else, ranking them higher than yourself‖ (Larkin, Required

Writing 54).

In the poem ―Reasons for Attendance‖ he suggests that in a humanist society

art may be higher calling than sexual happiness, but he leaves open the possibility of

error .Still he equates losing touch with sexual happiness : ― to losing one‘s faith in a

religious age‖(Larkin, Collected Poems 40).

46
 Larkin sought to write a quieter verse rooted in the real world, and he

explained his objective as follows: ―I tend to lead the reader in by the hand very

gently, saying this is the initial experience or object, and now you see that it makes

me think of this, that and the other, and work up to a big finish-I mean, that‘s the sort

of pattern. Other people, I suppose will just take a flying start several yards off the

ground, and hope the reader will ultimately catch up with them‖( Larkin, Required

Writing 34 ).

Larkin‘s use of self-critical persona reached its apex in ―Church Going‖ the

paradigmatic Movement poem. The dispute in the poem is what shall replace God in

the modern consciousness. Larkin tacitly accepts society‘s post-Christian condition,

but shows no pessimism at the notion of God‘s absence: ―The days when one could

claim to be the priest of a mystery are gone; today mystery means either ignorance or

hokum‖ (Larkin, Required Writing 83-84). Larkin insists the poem: ―isn‘t religious at

all. Religion surely means that the affairs of this world are under divine

superveillance, and so on, and I go to some pains to find out that I don‘t bother about

that kind of thing, that I am deliberately ignorant of it…..the poem is about going to

church, not religion‖ (Conversation 73). The narrator of church going does not

connect him with God but it does link him with humankind. He turns isolating

cynicism aside by recognizing a positive and communal ―hunger in himself to be

more serious‖.

Like his contemporaries Conquest and Wain, Larkin was worried about the

public role of poetry and opposed its being subsidized as a form of public

entertainment, but he was reluctant to use poetry as a platform for bardic

47
pronouncements, endorsing instead poetry to ― be read silently from the printed

page‖( Larkin, Required Writing 87).

He always writes from personal feeling or personal experience. He has himself

said: ―I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought / felt both for myself and

for others; though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which

I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake‖ (187). Here there is emphasis on

communication and also Larkin‘s affirmation of the mystery, complexity and value of

poetic activity. He goes on, ―Generally my poems are related, therefore, to my own

personal life, but my no means always, since I can imagine horses I have never seen

or the emotions of a bride without ever having been a woman or married.‖(188)

In this last sentence, Larkin hints at the extraordinary power of the imagination to feel

about and into an experience that the poet himself has never known to prove the

success and truthfulness of such acts of the imagination.

Dominant themes in his poems are love, death, and time. Time functions as a

nucleus of all themes underlying life. Time governs life, making it travel through

endless passage from birth to death. His attitude towards time is that it is a destructive

power. Time does not bestow happiness to him. Love is also a supreme illusion of

life. The lover‘s promise is empty and lovers are not honest. Time in its endless flow

destroys the lover‘s wishes against his expectations.

According to Jennings:―Larkin is a different case altogether in spite of the fact

that the surface interest of his poems has a good deal in common with the level,

unhoodwinked tone and texture of those of Kingsley Amis‖ (Jennings, Poetry Today

10). Larkin is a shrewd, melancholic lyric poet, an observer rather than a participator -

the kind of important minor poet, in fact, who has appeared now and then at odd times

48
during the last three centuries of English poetry. Such poets have in the past been tied

to a tradition of belief as well as to one of poetic style.

Donald Davie:

Davie is a poet and a critic and his achievements as a critic have exceeded his

poetic achievement. He laid a blistering attack on the modernist alteration of the

poetic syntax and appealed for a new prosaic approach to the diction and technique of

poetry. Though he retracted his association with the Movement, he is one of the chief

founders of the Movement. He is called the propeller of the Movement because of his

rich contributions of Purity of Diction in English Verse, Articulate Energy, Late

Augustans and his poetic collections are Brides of Reason, A Winter Talent and the

The Forest of Lithunie. The critic Kenneth Allot can be quoted in this reference: ―Mr.

Davie is, after Philip Larkin, the New Lines poet who has given the most pleasure and

A Winter Talent is one of the most satisfying collections of poems to be published

since the Second World War. Mr.Davie is extremely intelligent in both his verse and

prose (Allot 87).

The critic Bernard Bergonzi has observed that Davie is an international poet

incorporating Russian and French Literature and partly American history, yet his

subject is only England. He resides in California but has written themes from his

native country.

Davie‘s publication of The Winter Talent in 1957 represents a real advance on

his earlier work as it showed a desire to move away from the intellectual intricacies of

his early poems in order to struggle with a new and rewarding sort of difficulty that is

to express direct emotion in less rigid but equally disciplined forms. So in ―Time

Passing. Beloved‖, Davie uses a fluid generous line to write that hardest of poems – a
49
conventional love lyric. The poem ends: ―What will become of us? Time/Passing,

beloved, and we in a sealed/ Assurance unassailed/ By memory/ How can it end,/This

siege of a shore that no misgivings have steeled,/No doubts defend‖( Davie, Collected

Poems 1971-1983, 34 ).Such a naked expression would not have been possible in his

work six years ago.

He is associated with the Movement as Oxford scholars such as Larkin, Amis

and Wain while the others were from Cambridge. Davie comments on the connection

between university friendship and the emergence of literary figures:―For the last fifty

years each new generation of English poets … was formed or dreamed up by lively

under graduates of Oxford and each group has kicked up its Cambridge recruits only

afterwards and incidentally‖(Davie, The Poet in the Imaginary Museum 112 ).

While a representative practitioner of Movement theory,he displays

ambivalence about his participation in the group. He alternatively confers special

stature on the Movement and dismisses it as: ―the first concerted though unplanned

invasion of the literary establishment by the scholarship boys of the petty bourgeoisie

(Davie, These the Companions 136). Having always indentified with his blue collar,

northern rearing, he is a great admirer of Larkin and ―his refusal to go for experience

outside England‖ (123) yet Davie travelled widely, and his travels have influenced his

work. His Purity of Diction in English Verse is the most crucial example of the

Movement Criticism but he disavows the organizing principles of the group:

It wasn‘t like a Parisian French Movement, you know , it wasn‘t actually dreamed up

with a manifesto all afloat around a café, and so it didn‘t break up in vituperations on

matters of abstract principle. Simply it happened, then it dissolved itself. Its still true

that some of those poets , most of those poets within New Lines, I still have

50
 considerable affection for; and I am always interested in their writing ,where they‘re

going. I have a natural sympathy with them , though some of them now seem to be

writing very differently from me. In fact one wishes that that sort of thing happened

more often . (Davie, Trying to Explain 206)

In the above quotation it seems that there is a natural sympathy; the Movement

poets are like him. He also likes them because they are different. Further he says

about Larkin, Amis and Enright: ―These men are my friends and I think I know

perfectly well what makes them, being finally civilized men, pretend to be barbarians;

why, though they are humane persons and responsible citizens, they pretend

sometimes to be cultural teddy boys. They are putting the house of English poetry in

order: not before time, too….. They are getting rid of pretentiousness and cultural

window dressing and arrogant self expression, by creating an English poetry which is

severely limited in its aims, painfully modest in its pretensions, deliberately provincial

in its scope‖( Davie, The Poet in Imaginary Museum 48).

Davie understands clearly the reason these university writes became protective

when lumped together in an unsophisticated group; the very self- consciousness that

made them acutely aware of life‘s ironies also practically destroyed the group‘s

enterprise. He confesses: ―We ridiculed and deprecated ‗the Movement‘ even as we

kept it going…. Ours was writing which apologized insistently for its own existence‖

(72) He also declares that his early poems were designed in large part to

accommodate this aesthetic. He further says: ―What we all shared to begin with a

hatred for writing considered as self-expression; but all we put in its place was writing

as self- adjustment, a getting on the right terms with our reader‖ (74). This defensive

stance became a way of looking at the Movement poets and their pretense and not a

way of looking at the world.

51
 The Movement received its warm defense from Davies critical writings. He

asserted that Movement was no dogma but embodied the poets‘ desire for order and

decorum. His dominant theme is as a poet in search for discipline in poetic language.

The gravest sin the poet might commit is the sin against language by cheapening it

and by using it in an imprecise manner. Davie is Augustan because he pleads for a

poetry which has a rational address to the reading public. Poetry for him is not a

turning loose of emotions; it is a statement of facts which has a exact meaning for the

poet as well as for the readers. He is basically a poet of places and his poems on

English countries with a unique flavor.

Jennings in Poetry Today differentiates Davie from Gunn, Holloway and

herself who have strong affinities with the poets of seventeenth century and says that

Davie has a strong feeling for the poets of eighteenth century. He has the same

lapidary care, the same need to preserve and celebrate; above all, art is for him not

only the highest expression of civilization but a civilizing agent in its own right‖

(Jennings, Poetry Today 14).While sharing certain traits of intelligibility, economy

and perspicuity of effects with the other poets of the group, Davie stands out of his

group for his great literary and critical scholarship and a singular concern for the state

of letters in the contemporary world where science and technology are marginalizing.

He differs from the Movement colleagues as he is an academic iron who entered very

deeply in British literature.

Kingsley Amis:

Kingsley Amis is the only poet of the group who has continued a Movement

poet throughout his poetic career. Certainly there has been development in his poetry

but he has refined and perfected the moods and techniques of the Movement. In the

52
course of time he has come out off that note of polemical debunking which

characterized his early poems and has grown into a satirical poet. He has a positive

outlook in life. Amis has remained a ―sociable‖ poet, an ―entertainer‖ in a very unique

sense. He is the main practioner of that new provincialism in English poetry. He was

called ―a poet of common morality,‖ whose satirical vein is alike to Alexendar Pope

attacking the peculiarities existing in society.

His first collection of poems The Bright November came out in 1947.There is

neither a grand action nor a grand style. He believes in the poetry of ordinariness.

Here the poems are traditional in structure. He edited the Oxford Poetry in 1949 with

James Michie. He was also awarded the C.B.E in 1981. His earlier poems from A

Case of Samples were published in 1953 under the title of A Frame of Mind. His other

works include Old Devils (1986) The Crime of Country (1987) and Difficulties with

Girls. Davie has known the relevance of Amis‘ poetry with the political issue of the

period after Second World War and in this connection he says: ―Amis‘ poetry,

however, is much to our purpose, since for more than his novels it concerns itself

quite explicitly with political issues. It does so not under Hardyesque but rather under

Gravesian auspices…‖( Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry 358 ).

Amis also befriended Jennings at Oxford and for a time became her literary

mentor, though she was hardly an ironist in vein of Amis, Wain and Larkin. They

were all composing poems at the time. One of the poems, Retrospect seems to have

influenced Jennings‘s poem Delay for their endings are strikingly similar. Amis‘s

conclusion: ―And love is always moving else‖ (Amis, Collected Poems 32) resounds

in Jennings‘s words: ―And love arrived may find us somewhere else‖ ( Jennings, The

Collected Poems 11).Their poetry appeared together in Oxford Poetry (1948).

53
 Amis noted two things in Movement poets held in common: ―a desire to be

lucid if nothing else, and a liking for strict and fairly simple verse forms‖ (Brennan

19). ―Against Romanticism‖ presents Amis‘s disavowal of romanticism and is one of

the Movement‘s most enduring poems, fixes its credo in both positive and negative

terms. He explains the growth of romanticism but he makes no choice between its

forceful principles and the dilemma it poses for adherents unable to harness its force.

He contrasts those misled by prophesies and vision with the pragmatic, those

governed by rule and reason. Amis further mocks romantic doctrine in Ode to the

East- North- East-by- East Wind. Amis‘s wind: ―a cheery chap I can‘t avoid,‖ a

―sweating, empty handed labourer,‖ a mailles courier‖ (Amis, Collected Poems 54)

seems more real than Shelley‘s and he addresses it, not as a supplicant but with

reproof. The virtue … of the anti-romantic view of life‖ is that it expresses itself in

ways which appeal to humor as well as reason. ―Something Nasty in a Bookshop‖ is

another poem that help Amis establish as one of the Movement‘s chief critics of

romanticism.

The Movement poets had pride in the new provincialism and it further became

the major sources of criticism and was labeled as the middle brow muse. Michael Kir

Kham has commented that the Movement poets were guilty of: ―partisan self

advertising polemics and prescriptive manifestos for one kind of poetry‖, which limits

―the possibilities of poetry and discourages growth outside and within the group‖

(214).Here the qualities which are criticized are found most in Amis than any other

member of the group. Actually most of these poets have regretted the phase of the

Movement. Amis is the only one who was unrepentant. His later poems are as rooted

in reason and common sense as his earlier poems.

54
 Of late he has turned more to prose than poetry and that is the reason why his

poetry remained largely ignored. The critic Michael Schmidt excludes Amis from his

anthology of contemporary poetry on the basis that Amis was not central to the

tradition of English Poetry as he puts: ―Amis has written good poems. Yet they don‘t

add up to the English poetic tradition in the way Larkin‘s or Graham does. They are in

a sense peripheral to Amis‘s other work and to English poetry while Larkin‘s are

central and taken together, add up to an important body of work. The less successful

poems cannot be written off: they are a part of a continuing exploration‖(Schmidt 67).

Amis has summed up his achievement in the following words: ―What I was

doing was knocking British- anti- American and thought, put all the old arguments

into the mouth of a very unsympathetic character. I thought this was a good way of

showing up all those British attitudes. But I must have muffled it somewhere along

the line‖ (Amis, Contemporary Authors 10-11). Willaim Van O‘ Connor has praised

Amis, despite his small body of poems, as possibly as the best poets of the Movement

poets, and Clive James has observed that: ―Only the fact that he is so marvelously

readable can now stop Amis from being place in front rank of contemporary poets‖

((Connor 106).

D.J.Enright

Enright was the most liberally compassionate of the Movement wits. Enright

issued Poets of the 1950s which was to prove one of the most important volumes in

the history of the Movement. Prior to the book‘s publication, Movement poets had

supported one another‘s work individually and written complimentary review, but the

poets had not been collected in a single anthology. While Enright‘s itinerancy were at

odds with the Movement‘s traditional precepts for e.g. not travelling abroad but if

55
Enright had not travelled to Japan he would not have issued this anthology. Enright

compiled Poets of the 1950s for his Japanese students to acquaint them with the new

commonsense poetry that was being written in postwar England, ―the poetry of

civility, passion and order. Enright‘s friendship with Conquest was instrumental in

shaping the volume. He and his wife had stayed overnight at Conquest‘s house in

Hampstead, and Enright dedicated his poem Frankenstein to him. In return Conquest,

as one of the coeditors of the 1953 P.E.N anthology, included Enright‘s work

alongside his own and that of Kingsley Amis and Jennings. When Enright asked

Conquest for advice on what writers Poets of the 1950s should contain, Conquest

recommended the nine Movement poets. Enright had prepared a roaster himself, and

his preferences were identical to Conquest‘s except for Thom Gunn, whose work he

had not read. Enright and Conquest were in almost total agreement, Enright stuck

with original selections, and despite Gunn‘s absence and the limited audience for

which the book was intended, Poets of the 1950s became the first ―unofficial‖

Movement anthology. Enright intended no specific program and had no conception of

a poetic ―movement‖ in mind, but with the issuance of the Poets of the 1950s the

Movement arrived nonetheless.

Although the 1920s were clearly a dire decade for many families, Enright

frequently writes of those experiences with affection and a lack of prejudice.

Although the poems are clearly Enright‘s most confessional work, chronic misery,

because it is ordinary and unexceptional, this not bring him closer to religion as he

says: ―I cannot recall one elevated moment in church‖ (Enright, Collected Poems

134). He asserts in ―Sunday‖ yet he was sent to the church because his mother who

was non catholic thought that the experience may be useful later on. His further

disturbing experience of religion is found in Christmas poems. In ―Two Bad Things in

56
Infant School‖ he recalls the worst experiences where religion is at the heart of

complaint in his childhood.

He believes that television and other forces of class philistinism may

contribute to an unseemly narcissism he is no exception. He declares that language

may not prove an effective social corrective, particularly in the time that resists the

poetic, but continues to find social power in the printed word. ―After all, if words can

lead to war, why can‘t words avert war? No condition is closer to events more

profoundly related, than feeling responsible for them, however fictively ‗….. The

writers pursue nothingness only to find had to mark for others, a way out of it.‖

(Enright, Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 24). This was the root of the

Movement all along- away of the poetic nothingness of the 1940s.

―Only one subject to write about: pity / Self- pity: the only subject to avoid. /

How difficult to observe both conditions!‖ (Enright, Collected Poems 29). What

Enright embarks on here is to celebrate, in verse, common humanity and to judge

things in life on human grounds. His sympathy with man‘s plight is seen as an

extension of his own. He believes that to feel pity is not to patronize rather, it is to

support others in their struggle against the cruelties of life. It is this harmony which

expresses in his own poems with man against the ravages of time.

In his poetry, Enright: ‗with his disabused, unsentimental impressions of much

sentimentalized‘ events like, had adopted the low key idiom to catch the modish air of

sincerity to the experience without lapsing into the air of sentimentality. ―On the

Death of a child‖ shows a strongly felt resistance to any excess of emotion. The words

are allowed to determine their own intense and tightly bound system of relationships:

the intellect takes control of situation. It is this lack of thought in poetry for which

57
Enright and the other Movement poets criticize Dylan Thomas. Enright explains that

Thomas‘s poetry is obscure and deficient in intellectual conviction. Similar view is

adapted by Conquest in his Introduction to the Newlines. Conquest calls for a

renewed attention to the ‗necessary intellectual component‘ in poetry, viewed from

commonsense standpoint. With this conviction in mind ―On the Death of a child‖ is

consciously meant to be a revision of Thomas‘s ―A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by

Fire of a child in London‖. Structurally ―On the Death of a child‖ counteracts ―A

Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire of a child in London‖. The latter is a more

elaborate experiment in syntax and imagery than the former. While Enright‘s poem

consists of short stanzas and short sentences, Thomas‘s opening sentence stretches for

fourteen lines.

According to Jennings: ―Enright is a humanist who is more interested in other

people than in himself; he is felt in his verse not as a dominating presence but rather

than an astute commentator.( Jennings, Poetry Today 18). This is not because he

himself is not deeply involved in his subjects but rather because he is extremely

anxious that no shadow of subjectivity should blur his inquiries. At its best, as in ‗The

Noodle- Vendor‘s Flute‘, in Some Men are Brothers, his work is profoundly

disturbing and memorable.

Sleepless, we turn and sleep.

Or sickness dwindles to do some local limb,

Bought love for one long moment gives itself.

Or there a witch assures a frightened child

She bears no personal grudge.

And I, like other listeners,

58
 See my stupid sadness is a common thing.

And being common,

Therefore something rare indeed.

The puffing vendor, surer than a trumpet,

Tells us we are not alone.

Each night that same frail midnight tune

Squeezed from a bogus flute,

Under the noise of war, after war‘s noise,

It mourns the fallen every night,

It celebrates survival -----

In real cities, real houses, real time.

(Enright, Collected Poems 87)

The credibility of the poetry of Enright depends largely on his faithfulness to

the experience of real things worked upon by a lively imagination which both of them

celebrate. In his Introduction to Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse, Enright admires

the poets who: ―are writing out of and about the nature of our species and our time,

about real things rather than ‗literary‘ confections – and in my own dealings I must

hope I have not interpreted the concepts real and unreal in an unduly narrow sense for

the Imagination is both discoverer and inventor, moving at ease between the existent

and the inexistent, tempering or transmuting both. This viewpoint stems from the two

poets‘ belief in the meaningful relationship between the writer and life: from Larkin‘s

dislike to the false relationship between art and life‘ and Enright‘s view, quoting the

note of the young Ottilie of Goethe‘s Elective Affinities, that the surest way of

59
delivering yourself from the world is through art. And so is the surest way of binding

yourself to it‖ (Enright, Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse 44).

John Holloway:

Holloway is an important, original critic whose work is informed by the

Movement‘s desire for clarity. Although Holloway was an important contributor to

Poets of the 1950s and New Lines and was acquainted with most of the Movement

poets by 1954, he was the only original member of the Movement not included in

Conquest‘s New Lines 2. Despite Holloway‘s early alliance with the Movement – he

believed it was part of a social revolution: ―a stand against having a political stand‖ –

his work was omitted from the anthology. From that time onward Holloway remained

on the edge of the group, for the most part pursuing his own path as a critic, poet and

essayist.

According to Holloway, contemporary poetry need not to be mechanical or

merely a rearrangement of older styles, and his verses show a nostalgia for 18th

century Augustan attitudes and a repudiation of the popular poetry of Dylan Thomas

and the other apocalytpics of the 1940s, whom Conquest claimed: ―were encouraged

to regard their task simply as making arrangement of violence tapped straight from

the unconscious…. Or to evoke without comment the naivetes and nostalgias of

childhood‖ (Conquest, New Lines II).Holloway‘s autobiography, in contrast, records

daily life without such neo-romantic excess and therefore qualifies as serious

literature.

He received much critical attention even before the publication of his first

book. In 1943 he read for New Soundings to an estimated audience of 100,000 and in

June was amongst the first Movement poets to appear in the Spectator. His work was
60
soon accepted by Encounter, The New Statesman and Nation, the Times Literary

Supplement, and other weighty periodicals. His first collection was issued the

following year his Poems becoming the pamphlet 26 in the Fantasy Poets Series.

Though brief, Poems is thoroughly characteristic of the Movement. His Journey

through the Night familiarly echoes Larkin‘s The Whitsun Weddings. The

protagonist‘s confusion is representative of widespread postwar incertitude. Other

poems in this collection demonstrate Holloway‘s learning and interest in myth,

neither of which is typical to most Movement verse.

In The Minute Holloway shares with the other New Lines poets a fondness for

traditional verse forms, but these early poems have a peculiarity all their own. His

work is more visionary and decidedly more somber and obscure. It lacks the irony and

social correctives that instill many Movement poems, although he approximates

Larkin‘s wit to a degree in The Petty Testament of Peter the Clerk and The Life and

Adventures of Heroic Mr. Clubman. His poetry is as disciplined as that of his

associates, but it suffers from an obvious and calculated scholastic stiffness. His

language rarely seems imaginative, spontaneous or vibrant in contrast to the obscurity

of modern poetry. The critic William Meredith however appreciated the

craftsmanship of these poems and has praised the Movement qualities evident in

Holloways verse. He further finds that: ―Holloway‘s poems have the same emotional

integrity as Larkin‘s: they are all about something that has happened and been

experienced, none of them about feelings that have been encouraged‖ (Meredith 113).

Holloway‘s affection for the Movement poetry is most evident in his Hudson

Review critique of Davie‘s Brides of Reason, Larkin‘s The Less Deceived, and

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Conquest‘s Poems, all of which appeared shortly after The Minute debuted. Holloway

claimed that publication of these books should serve as:

A landmark, and the lien of poetic achievement which that landmark stands is

now hard to miss. ―Movement‖ in fact is just what, over the last three years, this

line has been called . These three poets are not only runners: Mr. Kingsley Amis,

Mr. John Wain, Mr. Enright and Miss Jennings have already published books

Of verse. Along the line too; novels by the first three of this of these make easily

The best-known part of the trend; and Davie‘s Purity of Diction in English Verse

is notable critical contribution. Certainly, the Movement writers toe no rigid party

line . Even the three poets under review here diverge a good deal. But: the

distinctive group of writers, writing activity over a broad front, critical re-thinking

that serves it – to fail, Still, to see that something is happening is simply to reveal

lack of interest: which is not to pre-judge the value of the ―Movement,‖ nor to assert

that nothing else is happening. ( Conquest, New Lines 592)

Holloway‘s appreciation for the Movement virtues is readily apparent, and he

identifies all the members of the group by name except for Gunn and himself. But

since his own poems had been issued by the two presses most closely identified with

the Movement and since his review is a clear endorsement of Movement principles,

his inclusion in the group should be inferred.

Holloway asserts that the poetic: ―landmark‖ of the Movement emanates from

―the great post- Eliot paradox of English poetical development‖ (Conquest, New lines

592), created on one hand, from a kind of avant –garde political romanticism rooted

in the poetry of Auden, Spender, and Day – Lewis and, on the other, from what he

62
calls ―a private Dylan Thomas inspired, Id- Romanticism: Mr.Barker, Mr. Gascoyne

and others‖ (New Lines 592). While the Movement poets identified more with a left

wing, public university poetic than any bohemian and Bloomsbury counterparts, the

backgrounds of its members was a rule lower middle class from the industrial

midlands and were non conformists in matters of religion. Holloway acknowledges

that the Movement altered these two strains of English romanticism in part by

blending them. While Movement poetry was often learned and university generated, it

also came to be identified with the country‘s provincial rather than elitist universities.

Though influencde by the academy, Movement poets tended to stay in the regions

where they were reared rather than near the universities in which they were educated,

thereby interrupting ―the automatic decanting process into upper-class England‖

(Conquest, New Lines 593), which Amis and Wain had sharply ridiculed in their

Lucky Jim and Hurry on Down.

In his earliest days Holloway was theorizing the Movement‘s aesthetic

portended a dramatic change in the tradition of English letters; as he puts: ―we are

witnessing the end of something which has been established ever since the death of

Keats and Hazlitt‖ (Conquest, New Lines 593). He calls attention to the two languages

of poetry: ―the language that points towards inspiration or abandon, and that which

points towards a dry, even cagey intelligence‖ (594) .He reproves exponents of the

first (Hopkins and Dylan Thomas) for their limited, recurring images and their

diction, which edges ―away from ordinary language towards declamation or

meditation or incarnation‖ ( Two Languages 15) which discounts the rational faculties

of the common man. Although language of the second sort is commonly associated

with the Movement, he traces the origin of poetic intelligence ―back long past John

Wain or Kingsley Amis to Empson; more still ….. to Auden; and further again, to the

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beginning of the vogue for Donne, to Eliot‘s early quatrain verse, and to the rise of

the Critic as Analyst‖( Two Languages 16).

Modern society could accommodate the poet in his various roles as a rebel,

bohemian, and prophet, but Holloway suggests that the second type carries an age –

old status. Some poets belonging to the first group more appropriately warrant

inclusion in the second. The second kind of poet gravitates to the universities and

related arenas Jennings in her library, Conquest in diplomacy, Enright in the Foreign

Service and his or her language dominates modern verse. Anticipating Movement‘s

critics and his own growing distance from the group Holloway contends that: ―the

virtues promoted by this second language of poetry – shrewdness, adroitness,

professionalism, freedom from excess- are mainly negative ones; and consequently

prove old- fashioned much more easily than seems at first likely‖(Holloway, The Two

Languages 15).

Like Davie, Holloway calls for a pure diction that separates the functions of

poet and critic. Poetry orders reality through its surcharged vision and so should be

approached not as: ―a lawyer going over a case, but a woman dancing with a man‖

(Holloway, The Lion Hunt, 32). It is not an interpretation of life but is life itself. He

defends his dedication to literary study, postulating that: ―we are not – at least not yet

– as lost as how our language seems to say…. But it is not me that is to blame, when I

wish to speak of the delight of art, and am stopped by the language‖ (27) Holloway

thinks that language should provide enrichment and regulation, inspirations as well as

order, and he enumerates what specifically must be taught, calling them the three

great duties of writers, critics and teachers.

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 Holloway‘s career as a poet and critic has been obvious by constant and

agitated loyalty to questions of intellectual inquiry and artistic structure. Though

influenced by the bardic poets he studied Blake, Yeats and others but never achieved

their visionary magnificence. His poetry is not witty as the Movement comrades. He

is a strict critic of the dull, minima vocabulary found in post-war verse. His work is

often mythopoeic in intent, is overly and unfashionably respectful of tradition and

structure, though in matters of literary criticism he remains a staunch individualist, a

literate scholar and a defender of close readings.

According to Jennings, Holloway: ― like Donald Davie is adept in handling a

great variety of poetic forms and cadences. Unlike Davie, however, his present verse

marks a wish to make private emotions public rather than a desire to use poetry to

recreate and preserve the sense of a vanishing civilization‖ (Jennings, Poetry Today

16). Both writers are notable for the clarity of their writing and for the literary tact

which makes their work entirely accessible even to the not very accommodating

reader.

Thom Gunn:

Gunn is the youngest of the Movement poets. His extravagant posturing is

unique to the Movement, yet these poses originate from familiar sources. Like his

Movement contemporaries Gunn equivocates between a romantic call to action and an

Augustan call for reflection. Being the youngest member of the group, Gunn was

familiar with the Movement stance before Fighting Terms was issued, although he has

continually downplayed its influence on him:

It was around the time of the original publication of this book, 1954, or perhaps

65
 a little earlier, that I first heard of something called the Movement. To my surprise,

I also learned that I was a member of it……. It originated as a half joke by Anthony

Hartley writing in the Spectator and then was perpetrated as a kind of journalistic

convenience. What poets like Larkin, Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, and I had in

common. At that time was that we were deliberately eschewing Modernism, and

turning back .Though not very thorough goingly, to traditional resources in structure

and method…The whole business looks now like a lot of categorizing foolishness.

( Gunn, The Occasions of Poetry 174)

Gunn had met Jennings in Oxford and John Wain when he spoke to a club at

Cambridge. Wain had read some of the Gunn‘s poems in the campus literary

magazine, and he invited him to London to meet other poets who were writing in a

similar fashion. But Gunn took no such trips. As he says:

I wasn‘t quite sure who these other chaps were. And then, it was about 1954,

Anthony Hartley referred kiddingly to something he called The Movement in

an article in The Spectator , and to everybody‘s surprise this got taken up and

taken seriously. Then in 1956, Robert Conquest brought out New Lines but

by that time the Movement had been born, had flourished and was fading .

Nobody any longer was making claims for the similarity between the different

poets. There is a certain amount of similarity between those eight poets but solely a

similarity of the times…. I never subscribed to any programme… The big joke about

the Movement was that none of the people had ever met each other and certainly

never subscribed to anything like a programme. There were a few chance

resemblances, but they were pretty chance.

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 (Hamilton, ―The Four Conversations‖60-70)

Gunn believed that both formal and informal diction could be natural modes

of expression, and by mixing them he was essentially melding two traditions: ―one

old, one current, but both vital. ―Informality has been used with imagination and

sensitivity by Amis and Larkin,‖ Gunn declared, ―while the potentialities of formal

language are as rich as ever…. What is important is that two kinds of diction can at

least co exist – and they must continue to , if we are to get away from the boring up-

and – down of alternating fashions in poetry‖ ( Gunn, Context 12-13).

Gunn and Larkin set themselves to explore the same theme of time but their

emphasis on them is different. It is central to Larkin: going to church, a trip to the

sea-side, a couple in bed and many similar experiences from daily life consist the

emotional spectrum in him the concept of the wasteful passage of time. He takes life

as it is. Gunn accepts the challenge of life and that is why the people in his poems are

often at odds with moderation and ordinariness. For him life is an endless race against

the endless flow of time. ―On the Move‖ provides a good example of how Gunn deals

with the problem of time ―The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows/ Some hidden

purpose/, and the gust of birds/ That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows,/

Have nested in the trees and undergrowth./ Seeking their instinct, or their poise or

both‖(Gunn, Fighting Terms 45) Here the poet is engaged in the celebration in the act

of the will and the violent spirit of combat in life. The reference to saints and holiness

in the poem does not substantiate any claim of piety for Gunn. Like Larkin he does

not solve the question of time by religion. Gunn is not religious as he says: ―I am

forever grateful,‘ that my brother and I were brought up in no religion at all.‖

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(Hamilton,―The Four Conversations‖10). Gunn looks for the truth of man and the

things that have the human imprint on them. He is in love with the bare fact of the

man made world. He said to Ian Hamilton: ―It‘s the liking for the man-made, for the

massive, for something that has the human imprint on it, rather than for the deserted,

the provincial. The liking for buildings more than mountains‖(11). The concrete

objects in his poems like the birds, bushes, and boys provide the raw material for the

experience he sets himself to explore.

Larkin speaks of death in terms of darkness in his poetry: ―nothing

contravenes/ The coming dark ‘(Larkin, Collected Poems 45 ) As to Gunn‘s poem , it

does not make its point firmly , instead it ends in a rambling conclusion, vaguely

pressing upon the idea of motion in time: ―One is always nearer by not keeping still‖

(Gunn, Collected Poems 387 ).

Gunn‘s love for travelling and his interest in different life –style give him a

wide range of experience though he expresses doubts about its validity. However, his

experience is not deep as of Larkin who associates travelling with misery; as he puts:

―the further one gets from home the greater the misery… travelling is very much a

novelist‘s thing …‖ as the poet is committed to recreating the familiar. Gunn‘s

admiration for the toughs and in his interest in their violent stance not only express

the certainty of life but reflect is struggle to find a way out of uncertainty. Yet to

understand the motive that is behind such a stance and such a movement is an

intricate problem for him.

Unlike Larkin, Gunn does not burn the bridges to the past. He maintains the

relationship between the present and the past; between the poetic experience and

tradition. On various occasions, Larkin expresses the mistrust in tradition and

68
mythology or what he calls the myth-kitty and the dead spots. On the other hand,

Gunn tries to explore the potentials of the mythic experience through the medium of

poetry especially in poems like Jesus and his Mother and Helen’s Rape. The central

idea of this poem is the recalling a past mythic incident of primitive sex violence.

Helen, a house wife has been raped by Paris. She likes her abduction to be as divine

as her mother‘s, Leda. Helen’s Rape recalls to mind Yeats‘s Leda and the Swan.

Gunn introduces the myth as a mere narrative structure. He does not enter the life

blood of the poem in the sense that it is not related to the poem organically. The poem

focuses on the past and does not explain the present. The result of that is the inability

to introduce the strong feeling of the past violent experience of rape into the present.

The reader cannot sympathize with Helen because the continuity of the rape

experience through time is not sustained. Helen’s Rape makes a sharp contrast to

Larkin‘s Deceptions in which he makes a past experience of rape felt strongly in the

present. Larkin feels strongly the agony of the wronged girl by speaking directly to

her back through the years; ―I can taste the grief‖ (Larkin, Collected Poems 67).

Although both poets deal with the past events which they read or heard about,

Larkin unlike Gunn persuades the readers to rally round his girl through his

faithfulness to experience which Gunn underestimates: ―When I came to write a poem

it was all important that I should be true to those feelings – even paradoxically, at the

risk of distorting the experience‖ (Gunn, Collected Poems 56) Memories are deeply

rooted in one‘s own past. But Larkin rejects the past altogether: ―And on another day

will be the past,/ A valley cropped by fat neglected chances.‖(Larkin, Collected

Poems 49) While Gunn considers the past as an inexhaustible source of happy

memories from a happy childhood: ―I had a happy childhood‖ The past invades

Gunn‘s present continually. Anything coming from the memory makes him review

69
his past and scrutinizes his own actions and relation to other people. On his return to

London in 1964, Gunn lived for a year ‗on Talbolt Road. After years of absence from

America , Talbolt road evokes the past, and the time past and time present become

curiously fused in his mind, and it is soon triumph of the past that maintains his strong

grip on him.: ― A London returned to after twelve years./ On a long passage between

two streets. I met my past self lingering there‖ (Gunn, Collected Poems 20). His

return to London puts him in touch with a reality he no longer experiences. It helps

him to recapture a certain moment; to regain what may otherwise be lost. This visit

also brings a confrontation with those parts of life which he had lived there. He meets

the other Gunn: ―a youth of about nineteen glaring at me‖ .This encounter gives a new

actuality to the past. Such a new actuality has been recorded by concrete details, such

as ―Hampstead Health‖, ―Path‖, ―tree‖ and ―bush‖. It is through the memory that past

is relived and the intensity of its present is heightened. As Gunn says: ―Memory is a

means of renewal.‖ Larkin‘s idea that the past is dead and the present is futile cannot

be applied to Gunn. To Gunn, the present is a continuous movement and energy. Even

the balcony he steps through the window of his room on Talbot road gives him an

access to a lively panorama: ―to air, to street, to friendship:/ for, from it, I could see,

blocks away,/the window where Tony, my old friend,..‖( 40)

Unlike Larkin, Gunn enjoys life everywhere and every time as he says: ― If

England is my parent and San Francisco is my lover, then New York is my own dear

old whore, all flash and vitality and history.‘ His visit to London turns out to be ,

above all, a reunion with his past: ― we gradually loosened into a shared laughter,/

This was the year of reconciliation to whatever it was I had come from…(145) Here

the reconciliation between the past and present is fully assimilated. Reconciliation

approximates to an understanding. It is not a riddle to him as it is to Larkin in

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Coming: ―And I/ Feel like a child / Who comes on a scene/ Of adult reconciling, /And

can understand nothing,….(78)

Gunn uses the personal past to express the emotional importance of a situation

in the present which are induced by his visit. While experiencing happiness, his mind

switches over to the past. This helps to light up the present through the remembrance

of past. It is evident that Gunn‘s commitment to the present is not a protection against

the heavy burden of the past or to dig for what once was and no longer is because he

has no old feelings he wants to escape: ―I forgave myself for having had a youth‖.(89)

If this is compared to Larkin‘s I Remember, I Remember Larkin‘s visit to his

birth place Coventry is basically not motivated by the search for his roots. As he is

approaching the city, he gives the impression of recalling things past compulsively or

has hardly ever allowed himself to think about them: ―Why, Coventry! I exclaimed. I

was born here.‖(30) This is so because he has no past. His childhood is ‗a forgotten

boredom‘ and his birth place is ‗only where my childhood was unspent‘

However the only apparent attitude Gunn has adopted in life is that he always

pictures the individual in terms of energy and a non-static condition. This sort of

attitude amounts more or less, to Larkin‘s ‗take life as it is‘.

Robert Conquest:

The poetry of Robert Conquest reminds us just how inherently opposed to

authority Movement writers were. Although trained as a social scientist , Conquest

published his first poems in Twentieth Century Verse in the late 1930s.His literary

career received a significant boost in 1945 when he won the P.E.N. Brazil Prize for

his long poem ―For the Death of a Poet‖. Conquest began to publish in the The

71
Listener The Spectator, and London Magazine, and in 1951 he won the Festival of

Britain verse Prize. But Conquest‘s first book of poems, titled Poems did not appear

until 1955. The book employed traditional meters and rhyme schemes and is political.

Two of the four sections in the book War and After War and Balkans draw upon

Conquest‘s experiences as a soldier well acquainted with Russian oppression. His

rhetorically controlled reserve style keeps the poems from sentimentality, and his

protestations when they occur are more intellectual than emotional objections to

tyranny. He feels a deep attachment for the frozen Balkan scenery and the inhabitants

who dwell under the weight of Soviet totalitarianism but politics is not a sole impulse

of his art. There are love poems too in this collection. Generally speaking Poems is a

collection of idiomatic occasional lyrics, war being but one of life‘s occasions, and it

exhibits the characteristic Movement reluctance to speak with authority on life.

Poems are awash in myth and associative meaning. The precision of Conquest‘s

diction in exploring hypotheses – the vocabulary, though rendered in ordinary

language, is often drawn from technical and scientific realms – triggers conclusions

that become the bases of his ironic observations on art and poetry. Particularly

important in Poems are Conquest‘s musings on technological subjects, where his

subdued coolness and clarity seem especially appropriate as counterbalances to his

strong humanistic concerns. Although his poems are mostly lyrical, the genre most

identified with self-expression, he enlarges their traditional margins by voicing a

rationalist view on matters of scientific inquiry and thereby achieves both an

intellectual and emotional quality simultaneously. His interest in technology

underscores the Movement‘s interest in establishing a practical urban poetic; the

―civilized‖ voice of Conquest seems more impressive than his choice of topics. As a

first collection, Poems shows extraordinary breadth, undoubtedly due in some

72
measure to Conquest‘s wide reading and extensive travels, but he creates sympathy by

modulating his curiosity in guise of traditional verse. The specificity of his language

transcends his choice of topics and therefore is a major attribute of his civility, and he

admitted as much as to London Magazine in 1962 when he claimed that an imaginary

collection The Thousand Worst Poems about the Atomic Bomb‖ would rival in

awfulness The Hundred Worst Poems about the death of Dylan Thomas. By denying

any poetic advantage derived from his interest in science, Conquest publicly

acknowledges a major difference between his verse and the work of other poets: his

topics may make him different but only his language can make him extraordinary.

Noting affinities in style, several reviewers compared Conquest‘s Poems with

the work of his Movement associates that group with whom he so readily identified

himself in A World of Difference. Philip Larkin‘s The Less Deceived and Donald

Davie‘s Brides of Reason were published with Poems but at that time Conquest‘s

poetry was judged to be not so flat and dull as that of his colleagues. Holloway even

called him ―the doyen of the Movement‖ though he acknowledged that Conquest‘s

verse possessed a distinctively exotic quality that set him apart from his cohorts, with

their nonconformist, suburban backgrounds. He commends Conquest‘s rich stream of

images, ―which flows with brilliant sensuous amplitude‖ (Holloway, Collected Poems

596) from the volume‘s diverse source of travel, pictorial art, modern science and

science fiction. Indeed the reviewer of The Times Literary Supplement called the

volume ―the most impressive first book of poems by an English writer to appear for

several years.‖ (Conquest, New Lines 12) that continued to taint modern poetry. Since

none of the members of the Movement was well known before the end of World War

II, Conquest could not bank on the reputation of a big name poet to attract attention to

his anthology. But claiming that ―the stage needed sweeping‖ (18) Conquest by

73
bringing the poets into a single work, achieved a twofold purpose: 1. He reestablished

a literary tradition that had been interrupted by stage self- consciousness of Dylan

Thomas and other apocalyptic poets.2. He presented a healthy body of modern poetry

whose intellectual honest and moderation distinguished it from poems that slavishly

imitated their predecessors.

Though not so important to his own poetry, the skepticism of the Movement is

conspicuous throughout the anthology, and Conquest chose poems that clearly

embraced the rational, empirical perspective so evident in Poems. Although he had no

intention of launching a poetry movement with New lines, by restoring a kind of

reason to English Poetry Conquest succeeded in establishing what was to be the

intellectual basis for the group. It was to as John Press observed: ―a call to order, an

attempt to revive certain principles that judged to be in suspended animation: verbal

control, intellectual strength, and emotional sanity‖ ( Press 67 ).

Conquest has maintained a practical approach to his craft, striving to avoid

obscurity through his choice of diction and familiar poetic structures. His formidable

poetic talent remains evident in Two Houseman Torsos . Despite his achievement as

poet, editor, novelist and cold war historian, Conquest has sought no preeminence

over his Movement companions; he stakes: ―no claim whatever to moral or any other

sort of superiority over poets who write of Arundel tomb. Poets can only write in the

way they themselves feel appropriate, on themes which form part of their properly

assimilated, imaginative ballast‖ (Conquest, New Lines I ).

John Wain

Wain does not widen the subject matter but writes with many kinds of verse

forms and rhythms. There is concern with honesty and truthfulness. He lacked the
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working class background of the most other Movement writes. The severe lessons of

life he learnt in childhood trained him for an adult life infinitely worse than anything

that he actually experienced. They influenced his writing as well a body of work that

sees a world as: ―something to be feared, I cannot remember a time when everything

seemed to be cozy, secure, and optimistic‖(Bradley 74)

His first book of poems Mixed Feelings exhibits the Movement‘s distrust of

the 1940s romanticism.He favors clarity, restraint, and directness. He employs the

complex verse forms sonnets, villanelles, and terzarima, Empson used this in the

1930s but he imbues them with the concerns of the 1950s. Consequently the poems

have a distinctly academic air.

Love is the principal topic of A Word Carved on a Sill. More than any other

Movement poet Wain has taken up the romantic love lyric. In Cameo he compares the

perfection of lovers arching like bridges to a modern city, but the poem escapes

sentimentality. The interminancy of love and Wain‘s homage to Empson are most

cogently revealed in ―Eighth Type of Ambiguity‖. Wherein he asks, if love had rule

the world, why has the world not been subdued? Like Larkin, Wain is able to see both

the enchanting and destructive aspects of love.

Weep before God (1961) is a continuation of Wain‘s low-key poetics. His

―Apology for Understatement‖ and ―Poem without a Main Verb‖ epitomize the

reserve of Movement verse and its reverence for a reticence that keeps ―the keen

equipoise between always and never‖ (Bradley 74).Wildtrack (1965) is a greater

philosophical departure from the Movement‘s rhetorical stoicism. Wildtract contrasts

man‘s day self- that is, his social identity- with his night self, that inward looking

spirit that separates him from others.

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 Over his career John Wain moved from considering the isolation of the

individual in personal terms to historical ones, and his attachment to the Movement

seems enigmatic. While he has since the early 1980s forsaken the long poem for those

between 75 to 150 lines, he has strived to hold onto the attributes found in shorter

Movement poems, particularly their linguistic precision and logical coherence. As for

the so called ‗Movement‘, Wain observes: ―I only wish my writing really did have the

virtues of the Movement as, say, Philip Larkin does but I know, inwardly that I don‘t

fit in properly anywhere‖(Wain , Sprightly Running 47 ). While caring that too many

writers under 40 still ―write endlessly about themselves and their own feelings and

compose a kind of loose knit verse which presents carefully chosen images in

carelessly chosen words,‖( 47). Wain is also willing to write about profound personal

experiences, but his approach is decidedly more cerebral.

Perhaps it is the ambivalence that most differentiates him from the others. His

poem ―In the Beginning,‖ for example is typically lyrical in its exploration of the first

hours of love. He does not deny the moment‘s perfection, only his ability to speak of

it. Reserve and balance attend even in times of strongest emotion: ―This

equilibrium,/Most rare and perilous balance, leaves me dumb/To say it all, to name

the gems and metals‖ (Wain, Collected Poems 45).

Wain‘s maverick nature prevents him from accepting any doctrinaire position,

and he refuses identification with any movement program:

I must have freedom to do my work as effectively as possible, and a label

narrows that freedom from the outside , as a program narrows it from inside.

In my opinion, a writer has no business with programmes because his job is to

keep himself alert and able to deal with truth in any form in which it may

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 confront him. His object is to merely understand, and pass on to his readers,

as much truth as He can comprehend……..Programmes are bad because they

almost inevitably lead the Writer to over- simplify. A program is an abstraction

from human experience, and the truth is always richer, more various, and more

contradictory than abstraction… For myself, I refuse to have a programme , or

even to become associated with one particular type of subject matter.

(Wain, Sprightly Running 206-208)

While as a young man he welcomed the Movement‘s impulse toward popular

poetry, Wain believes that its promise of liberation has gone unrealized. ―At this

point, the modern academic steps in again, to remind me that my values are based on

an obsolete regard for the individual. In an age of collectivism, here am I m quaintly,

still making un - argued assumption that it is better for human beings to think and feel

as individuals than as a mass‖(Wain, Sprightly Running 206-208).

Larkin, Amis and Davie signify an important phase of English poetry in the

1950s. These poets try to restore English poetry in it soil. They discarded the

modernist cosmopolitan of the twenties and also the socialist attitude Larkin, Amis

and Davie who form the nucleus of the Movement called for the principles of

ordinariness, simplicity and clarity .They tried to modify the extravagances of the

Modernist tradition. The three of them continued to be Movement poets and though

they were influenced by other poets they safeguarded the basic ideals of rationality,

commonsense and clarity in their poems. Their vision of limitation has been singled

out for contempt and their critical attack was a deep-rooted spiritual necessity at a

time when English poetry needed a new direction.Though their individual

achievements vary they all together took in hand the task and attained it eminently.

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 There is a remarkable relationship between Larkin‘s work and that of Gunn,

Enright, Amis and Wain. As they are faced with an unkind environment they illustrate

a fascination with facets of everyday life. They treat the everyday world as they find it

and hence they are realists. More arresting are the differences between them. Despite

the seemingly distinct similarities there is great contrast between them. Gunn is

opposite to them in his treatment of time and tradition. He is firmed to look reality in

the face. How poetry is concerned with constant movement with all risks might come

on the way.

Wain‘s and Enright‘s poems are depressing yet offer a realistic view and a

grievance against the forces of destruction in life. Together with Amis they try to

understand and reconcile with time and suffering. They achieve a sort of balance

within themselves which is highlighted in their poetry. Gunn‘s attitude of violence for

violence sake lands him nowhere. He accepts the past as a source of happy memories

and the present as a continuous movement to achieve his future desires. Except

Larkin, rest of the poets accept the past and consider it as a vital period in the

formation of one‘s life. However they share the same idea that life is contradictory.

They all accept the view that life is tragic yet are driven by different urges to carry on.

Larkin by acceptance of life, Gunn by revolt against it, Enright and Amis by

reconciliation and Wain by uncomplaining resistance.

Larkin, Enright Amis and Wain stress the importance of personal experience

in the making of their poetry in an attempt to set up a meaningful association between

art and commonplace.: As Larkin says: ―Generally my poems are related, therefore to

my own personal life, but no means always, since I can imagine horses I have never

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seen or the emotions of a bride without having been a woman or married‖ (Larkin,

Required Writing 25).

In one sense, this may be taken to testify to the idea that these poets

choose the rationale that there are no inborn ideas and that all ideas

we have spring, in John Locke‘s terms, ― From experience : in that all

our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.‖

Nevertheless, this may be the case in Gunn‘s poetry with its marginal

philosophical generalizations. As to the poetry of the rest, the

imagination is superior to the intellect yet controlled by it to block

any tendency towards sentimentality.(Hassan 190)

This insistence on personal experience brings the whole problem of

convention and tradition, and their attitudes to them, into focus. Gunn and the later

Enright employ the mythic experience to explore the present. This myth falls short as

the myth is awkwardly related to their material.

By contrast Larkin, Amis, Wain and the early Enright observe the earth-bound

poet who is really engaged in recreating the familiar. They do not use any mythology,

philosophy or references to other poets. Hence their poetry is descriptive. It is rooted

in time as it is concerned with everyday life and man‘s relation to it. Their

achievements as poets are in the depicting things and experiences in exact terms of

their existence.

Key Concepts:

The main concepts which deal with the study are as under:

Romanticism:

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 Romanticism is a sweeping but indispensable modern term applied to the

profound shifts in western attitudes to art and human creativity that dominated much

of European culture in the first half of the 19th century, and that has shaped most

subsequent developments in literature. It emerged in 1790s in Germany and Britain

and in the 1820s in France and elsewhere. It is also known as Romantic Movement or

Romantic Revival. The main strain of romanticism was upon freedom of individual,

self-expression, sincerity, spontaneity, emotional directness of personal experience,

boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration. The creative imagination

occupied the centre of Romantic views of art, which replaced the ―mechanical‖ rules

of conventional forms with an ―organic‖ principle of natural growth and free

development. It discarded the decorous invitation of classical models favored by 18th

century new-classicism and rejected the ordered rationality of the enlightenment as

mechanical, impersonal and artificial. Romantics viewed nature as mysterious and

ever changing and its laws will never be fully understood. The Romantics emphasized

intuition which is independent of reason. For them imagination was ultimately

superior to reason. The Romantics stressed the human potential for social progress

and spiritual growth.

Mysticism:

Mysticism is a term so irresponsibly applied in English that it has become the

first duty of those who use it to explain what they mean by it. The Concise Oxford

Dictionary (1911), after defining a mystic as "one who believes in spiritual

apprehension of truths beyond the understanding, ―adds, "whence mysticism."

Whatever may be the precise force of the remark in brackets, it it is unquestionably

true that mysticism is often used in a semi-contemptuous way to denote vaguely any

80
kind of occultism or spiritualism, or any specially curious or fantastic views about

God and the universe.

Confessional Poetry:

This type of poetry designates a type of narrative and lyric verse, given

impetus by Robert Lowell‘s Life Studies (1959), which deals with the facts and

intimate mental and physical experiences of the poet‘s own life. It is an

autobiographical mode that reveals the poet‘s personal problems with unusual

frankness. It differs in subject matter from poems of Romantic period about the poet‘s

own circumstances, experiences, and feelings, such as Wordsworth‘s ―Tintern

Abbey‖ and Samuel Coleridge‘s ―Dejection an Ode,‖ in the candor and detail – and

sometimes the psychoanalytic insight with which the poet reveals private or clinical

matters about himself or herself. Confessional poems have been written by Allen

Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and other

recent American poets.

Feminism:

Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining,

establishing, and defending equal political, economic, cultural, and social rights for

women. This includes in quest of establishing equal opportunities for women in

education and employment. A feminist supports the rights and equality of women.

Feminist theory that emerged from feminist movements, aims to recognize the nature

of gender inequality by examining women's social roles and lived experience; it has

developed theories in a variety of disciplines in order to respond to issues such as the

social construction of sex and gender.

81
 Thus the first introductory chapter moves ahead towards the second chapter

towards a detailing of Movement Poetry and Modernism and a detailed look at

Jennings her major works and development, her approach, themes and forms.

82
 Works Cited:

Abrams, M.H. Glossary of Literary Terms. London: Macmillan, 1998.Print.

Allot, Kenneth. Keneth Allot and the thirties. Liverpool: University of Liverpool

Press,1980. Print.

Amis, Kingsley. Memoirs. New York: Summit 1991; hereafter cited in thesis as

Memoirs.

—— Collected Poems 1944-1979 .New York: Viking, 1979. Print. (Hereafter cited in

thesis as Amis CP.

—— Poets of the 1950s, Ed. D.J.Enright Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1955.

—— quoted in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Detroit: Gale,(1990)

Print. (Hereafter cited in thesis as CA.)

Auden, W.H. Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. London: Faber, 1966.Print.

Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1990. Print.

Bayley, John. ―Too Good for This World‖ Times Literary Supplement 21May 1974:

654. Print.

Bateson, F.W. ―Auden‘s and Empson‘s Heirs‖, Essays in Criticism 7 (1957):76-77.

Print.

Blamires, H. Twentieth Century English Literature. London: Macmillan, 1982.Print.

Bradbury, Malcom and James Mc Farlaine. Modernism: 1890- 1930. UK Penguin:

1978.Print.

Brenan, Neil. ―Kingsley Amis‖ Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale,

1978.89-90. Print.

Burges, Anthony. The Novel Now, A Guide to Contemporary Fiction. New York:

Norton,1967. Print.

Carter, Ronald and John Mc.Rae. The Routledge History of Literature in

83
 English: Britain & Ireland.2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge,

2001. Print.

Corcoran, Neil. English Poetry Since 1940. London: Longman, 1993.Print.

Conquest, Robert. New Lines . London: Macmillan, 1956. (Hereafter cited as NL )

Conquest, Robert. New Lines II. London: Macmillan, 1963.(Hereafter cited as NL II)

—— Poems London: Macmillan, 1955. Print.(Hereafter cited in thesis as RC Poems)

—— ―Context‖ London Magazine 3 June 1962: 33-34. Print. (Hereafter cited in thesis

as Context)

Davie, Donald. ‗Landscapes of Larkin‘ Thomas Hardy and the British Poetry.

London: Routlege & Kegan Paul. 1973. 63-68.Print.

—— Purity of Diction in English Verse. New York: Schocken, 1967.Print.

—— These the Companions Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1982.Print.

—— Trying to Explain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1979.Print

—— Articulate Energy: An inquiry into the syntax of English Poetry. London:

Routledge, 1955.Print.

—— Thomas Hardy and British Poetry New York: Oxford University

Press, 1972.Print.

—— Collected Poems 1971-1983.Manchester: Carcanet, 1983. Print.(Hereafter cited

in thesis as Davie CP.)

—— The Poet in the Imaginary Museum New York: Persea, 1977 Print.( Hereafter

cited in thesis as Museum.)

Daiches, David. A Critical History of English Literature. New Delhi: Rupa &Sons,

1995. Print.

Dodsworth, Martin. ―The Climate of Pain in Recent Poetry.‖ London Magazine

3 November 1964:87. Print.

Drew, Elizabeth. Poetry: A Modern Guide its understanding and Enjoyment. New

York: Dell Co, 1967.Print.

84
Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis .Boston: Twayne, 1981.Print.

Gardener, W.H. Poems and Prose of Gerald Manley Hopkins. Harmonsworth:

Penguin Books, 1953.Print.

Gunn, Thom. The Occasions of Poetry. London: Faber, 1982.Print (Hereafter cited in

text as Occasions. )

—— A Sense of Movement. London: Faber, 1967.Print.

—— Collected Poems. UK: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.Print.

—— ―Context.‖ London Magazine.1 Jan. 1962:12-13.Print.

Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S.Eliot. London: Faber, 1969.Print.

Enright, D.J. Collected Poems 1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Print.(Hereafter cited in thesis as Enright, CP.)

—— Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse. 1945-1980. Oxford: Oxford University

Press. 1980. Print.

Finch, Peter. ―British Poetry since 1945‖ The Continuum Encyclopedia of British

Literature a view from 2001. 14 March (2001): Web. 25 June. 2014.

http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/enc.htm

Fraser, G.S. The Modern Writer and His World. UK: Penguin, 1970.Print.

Hamilton, Ian. The Modern Poet: Essays from the Review. London: Macdonald, 1968.

Print.

——. ―The Making of the Movement.‖ New Statesman 1971:23. Print.

——. ―Four Conversations.‖London Magazine 8 November 1964:79-80.Print.

Hartley, Anthony. ―In the Movement.‖ The Spectator 1954:45-47. Print.

Hassan, Salem K. Philip Larkin and his Contemporaries: An Air of Authenticity. New

York : St. Martin‘s Press, 1988.Print.

Holloway, John. ―New Lines in English Poetry.‖ Hudson Review 9 April 1956:

57.Print. (Hereafter cited in thesis as New Lines.)

—— Poems. Oxford: Fantasy Poets Number 26, 1954.Print.

85
—— The Lion Hunt.A Pursuit of Poetry & Reality. London: Routledge, 1964.Print.

—— ―The Two Languages‖ English Poetry since 1945.London 2 November

1959:23.Print. (Hereafter cited in thesis as Two Languages.)

Hough, Graham. ―The Function of Criticism‖ The Listener 25 June 1963:707.Print.

Kaufman, Gerald. ―Why we are where we are.‖ Renewal: Labor’s Britain in the

1980s, Oxford: OUP, 1980.Print.

Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image, London and New York: Great Britain TJ

International Ltd. Padstow, Cornwall, 2002.Print.

Hulme, T.E. Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. London:

Routledge and Paul, 1924.Print.

Jennings, Elizabeth. Let’s have some poetry. London: Museum Press, 1960.Print.

—— Poetry Today. London: Longmans. 1961.Print.(Hereafter cited as PT)

—— ELEZABETH JENNINGS The Collected Poems. Ed. Emma Mason.Manchester

: Carcanet, 2012. Print. (Hereafter cited in the thesis as Jennings TCP.)

Larkin, Philip. The Oxford book of Twentieth Century Verse. London: Oxford

University Press, 1973.Print.

—— Prose and Fiction by Larkin: All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961-

68. London: Faber,1970.Print.

—— Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. London: Faber and Faber

,1983. Print.( Hereafter cited as RW in thesis)

—— Collected Poems: New York: Farrrar Straus, 1989, Print.( Hereafter cited in

thesis as Larkin CP.)

—— ―Four Conversations,‖ London Magazine, 3 November 1964: 45 Print.; hereafter

cited as ―Conversations.‖

Leavis, F.R. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of Contemporary Situation.

US: Penguin, 1967. Print.

Martin, Bruce. Philip Larkin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Print.

86
Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After. Cambridge,

Mass: Belknap, 1987.Print.

Press, John. Rule and Energy. London: Oxford University Press,1963. Print.

Macbeth, George. Poetry 1900-1965. London: Longmans with Faber, 1967.Print.

MacLeish, Archibald. Poetry and Experience. US: Penguin, 1965.Print.

Michael Brett, New Collected Poems. Ed. Stephen Spender. UK: Faber and

Faber, 2004. Print.

Middleton, Murry. The Problem of Style. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Print.

Morrison, Blake. The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. Oxford:

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Pinto, Vivian De Sola. Crisis in English Poetry. London: Hutchinson University,

1958. Print.

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87
Stead, C.K. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. New York: Harper and Row,1964. Print.

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Thwaite, Anthony, Poetry Today 1960-1973. London: Longman, 1973.Print.

Wain, John. Poems 1949-1979 London: Macmillan,1980. Print. (Hereafter cited in

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—— Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography. London: J. Murray, 1986.Print.

—— Essays on Literature and Ideas, London: Macmillan, 1963.Print.

Wellek Rene and Austen Warren. Theory of Literature. UK: Penguin, 1966.Print.

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Interview:

Gramang,Gerlinde. Interview with Elizabeth Jennings on August 26, 1993, Oxford.

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