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The Movement Poetry : a Brief Analysis The Global Journal of Literary Studies I Volume II, Issue I I February 2016 ISSN : 2395 4817 The Global Journal of Literary Studies I February 2016 I Vol. II, Issue I I ISSN : 2395 4817 The Movement Poetry : A Brief Analysis Dilber Mehta Assistant Professor M. Sc. IT Programme Veer Narmad South Gujarat University Surat, Gujarat, INDIA. Abstract There have been several controversies and debates regarding the existence of the Movement of the 1950s.However this Movement has been of considerable importance in a sense that it has established a break from earlier traditions of poetry and produced works of enormous importance. This paper looks at the major traits of the Movement poetry, the Movement Poets and analyses The Movement as an important progression of the British Literary Scene of the 1950s. Keywords : The Movement Poetry, The Movement Poets, Major traits of the Movement poetry. The Global Journal of Literary Studies I Volume II, Issue I I February 2016 ISSN : 2395 4817 1. Introduction: There have been several controversies and debates regarding the existence of the Movement of the 1950s.However this Movement has been of considerable importance in a sense that it has established a break from earlier traditions of poetry and produced works of enormous importance. This paper looks at the major traits of the Movement poetry, the Movement Poets and analyses The Movement as an important progression of the British Literary Scene of the 1950s. 2. The Twentieth Century British Poetry: Each decade of a century has thrown up a poetic idiom to match the times. Throughout the 20th century, modern British poetry became progressively more varied and comprehensive moving away from the “centre” (the academic-oriented and predominately poetic scene of London) to include a wide range of poetry from Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and English-speaking countries overseas. As the British Empire shrank and Britain’s former colonies attained independence, the new immigrant population 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 recognition. 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 on this change. —— “Since 1945 British Poetry has moved steadily from what many regard as twentieth century parochial to a twenty-first century international”(Finch, 1). The twenties were the modernist years with an emphasis on experimentation with form and freedom of subject matter; there was a conscious appropriation of poetry to the use of high culture during this decade. However with international fascism on the rise and the imminence 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 informed by public school Marxism and Freudian beliefs. When war broke out in 1939, the impulse to warn which had characterized Auden’s verse was no longer there. The spectre of death and destruction was uppermost 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 pace with developments in society, with the zeitgeist. The name given to this general tendency after the war was the Movement. 3. The Movement: Group identity is a usual trend in the literary history. As there are University wits in the 16th century, the Pre-Raphaelites in the 19th century in similar strain writers of the 1950s are given a group identity for a short period of time under the title as Movement writers. The Movement refers to the particular movement of the 1950s with a definite group of poets, characteristics, specific aims and manifesto, and its identity as an important document in literature. The Movement was a reaction against the excessive romanticism of the previous identifiable major movement in British poetry; the New Apocalyptics. They had been irrational, incoherent and outrageous whereas the Movement poets tended towards anti-romanticism, rationality and sobriety. John Press has described it as —— “a general retreat from direct comment or involvement in any political or social doctrine” (Press, 76). The Movement produced two anthologies: Poets of the 1950’s by D.J.Enright (1955) and The New Lines (1956) by Robert Conquest. He described the connection between the poets as ——‘little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles’ (Conquest, 5). These ‘bad principles’ mean excess in The Global Journal of Literary Studies I Volume II, Issue I I February 2016 ISSN : 2395 4817 terms of themes and stylistic devices. The introduction to the New Lines targeted the excesses of the 1940 poets especially Dylan Thomas and Barker. A second New Lines anthology appeared in 1963, by which time The Movement came into existence in the shape of The Group. It was the most intellectually fashionable coterie in Britain in the 1950s.It had an elaborate and controversial history in the practice of poetry. A theoretical basis emerged as a reaction against Eliot’s notion that contemporary poetry “must be difficult” and against the wordy obscurities of the 1940s. The Movement in general, seems to have played an important and significant role in leading English poetry from Modernism to Postmodernism. There was something peculiar, new and unprecedented about the Movement. It connoted the socio - cultural as well as literary identity of the group. Socio -cultural group identity was soon to become a prominent feature of postmodern mass society with plurality of culture. The Movement as the new development had obtained coherence. The work of its poets nurtured naturally, was unreceptive to myth, was conservatively pitched and was intentionally formal and clear. Thus it can be perceived that the Movement has staged a rebellion against the modern poetry of the 1920s, represented by Eliot and Pound. 4. Origin and Development of the Movement: The Key factors responsible for the origin and development of the Movement were the Friendships made at Oxford and Cambridge between the different Movement poets and another major role was played by Journalism in the development of the Movement The Movement took its first breath in Oxford and then in Cambridge in the 1940s when the young writers came close to one another. They were not mature scholars with serious concern about life but were undergraduate students studying at Oxford or Cambridge. Their interaction with one another influenced their writing in the beginning of their career as literary artists. Important influences on these “Oxford poets” were Empson and Auden. By 1951, the first stage of the Oxford influence on the Movement had been completed and this was underscored by Bateson founding Essays in Criticism as a match to the work of Scrutiny, and publishing articles by Movementeers notably Amis, Holloway, Davie, Wain, Enright, Larkin and Conquest. Essays in Criticism became the only Oxford “contact” between Movement poets as the poets dispersed in different directions later on. Commenting on the importance of the cohesive Movement Morrison remarks ── “ Without those friendships neither the group programme nor the impressive individual works which emerged out of it would have not been possible.” (Morrison, 29) At Oxford, Amis, Larkin and Wain, and subsequently, Elizabeth Jennings came up at about the same time; Larkin was admired by Amis and Wain, and these mutual admirations led to actual similarities in their writings. Cambridge was also a place of significance for the making of the Movement. Cambridge recruits to the Movement were Gunn, Davie, and Enright. While their contacts with each other were limited by the exigencies of the war situation, they were united by their common loyalties and predilections. They were all admirers of F. R. Leavis’s rigor and skepticism. J. W. Saunders has pointed out that the periodicals and magazines can often ‘compensate the poet for lack of centers in which he can meet his colleague’ and around 1950- with Amis in Swansea, Larkin in Belfast, Davie in Dublin, Enright in Birmingham and Wain in Reading- such compensation was undoubtedly essential to the formation of a Movement aesthetic ( Saunders 213). The Movement writers found a common platform to express themselves. Mandrake, an Oxford based magazine edited by Wain and Bayers, brought out poems by the Movement writers. The Movement came into limelight through media as well. John Lehman edited a series of radio broadcasts under the title The Global Journal of Literary Studies I Volume II, Issue I I February 2016 ISSN : 2395 4817 “New Soundings” on the BBC radio between March 1952 and 1953. Poems by several new writers like Davie, Gunn, Holloway, Jennings and Wain reached the masses through this programme. It was an unusual phenomenon as in the past media was never used in this manner. Further the BBC Radio broadcasted a similar programme called First Reading prepared by a leading Movement writer, John Wain. The programme, as Morrison records, ── “has been seen as a crucial break through for the Movement writers” (Morrison, 42). 5. The Movement Poets: The nine Movement poets are Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Robert Conquest, John Holloway Thom Gunn, D.J. Enright, Donald Davie and Elizabeth Jennings. 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.
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