1 Subject: ENGLISH Class: B.A. Part 1 English Hons., Paper-1, Group B Topic: The Movement Poets Lecture No: 24 By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email: [email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No: 9934917117 “THE MOVEMENT POETS” INTRODUCTION • The Movement Poetry stands for a group of poets who were writing their poems in the fifties and sixties of the 20th century. • A Dictionary of Literary Terms by MARTIN GRAY defines the term of 'The Movement' in these words: "The Movement to the kind of poetry written by a group of poets in 1950s which was quite different from the modernist poetry. ‘The Movement’ in 1953s for poems written by KINGSLEY AMIS, JOHN WAIN, ELIZABETH JENNINGS, THOM GUM, DONALD DAVIE and D.J.ENRIGHT. After some time a work of the above poets was published with the name 'New Lines Anthology' by ROBERT CONQUEST.” 2 • Deeply English in outlook, the Movement was a gathering of poets including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, John Wain, D J Enright and Robert Conquest. Many of the group were academics, and their critical writings helped shape the course of British literature for the next two decades. • The Movement – were Oxbridge-educated, white, predominantly male, middle-class, and for the most part heterosexual. • The Movement arose as a reaction to both modernism and this neo- Romanticism, grounded in the aftermath of World War II. There was a general desire to avoid any heroic sentiments at all and to live in the ordinary here- and-now. • Of this group of poets, Philip Larkin (1922-1985) emerged as the most popular. His poetry did a good deal to re-engage poetry with a more popular audience. Other poets, such as Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) and John Wain (1925-1994), made wider names for themselves as novelists, especially as part of the group known as the Angry Young Men. • The title for the group was coined in 1954 by the literary editor of The Spectator, J D Scott, who referred to ‘this new Movement of the Fifties’. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MOVEMENT POETS: • The Movement can be seen as an aggressive, skeptical, patriotic backlash against the cosmopolitan elites of the 1930s and 1940s. • The poets in the group rejected modernism, avant-garde experimentation, romanticism and the metaphorical fireworks of poets such as Dylan Thomas. • Their verse was ironical, down to earth, unsentimental and rooted in a nostalgic idea of English identity. • The poetry of the Movement aims at stark realism. It is rational, empirical, and argumentative. 3 • It employs traditional syntax, using ordinary diction; and it is most often colloquial in style. • It employs symbols which tend to make it difficult to understand; it is most often vague in its meaning. • It is highly allusive. It is very learned and demands from the reader a high degree of intelligence and vast knowledge. • It generally tends to obscurity. • The poetry of the Movement seeks to establish a direct relationship between the poet and his audience, and that is why it deals with ordinary and common themes in an ordinary and plain style. MAIN MOVEMENT POETS: Philip Larkin (1922-1985) • Philip Larkin is always pointed at as one of the major English poets of the 1950s. • Philip Larkin is generally acknowledged to be a representative poet of The Movement, which grew up out of and was a reaction against the Modernist movement. Larkin's work fits firmly in the characteristics that define The Movement. These characteristics pertain to form, self, individualism, and realism. • Larkin’s poetic output includes: The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955) Whitsun Wedding (1964), and High Windows (1974). • As a poet his reputation rests most on his The Less Deceived (1955) which brought him into recognition as an important poet, and also on his association with the Movement. The most celebrated and anthologized poem of Larkin is the Whitsun Wedding which is considered by all critics his best poem. • Philip Larkin is truly “a man next door” as a poet and as a man too. • He began writing after the World War II, in the midst of disillusionment and uncertainty, but he advocated the simple and clear notions rather than the 4 complex and vague ones. For this reason, he rejected all the artificalities, vagueness, and difficulties of the modern poetry. • He refused what Pound and Eliot adhered in making modern poetry difficult and highly symbolic, allusive and dependent on myths. • Such poetry, Larkin believed never covers life as it is. Poetry should be the poetry of every man, not of the intellectual elite. The poet on the other hand, should be a neighbor to the reader who feels what the reader feels. • Poetry should please, not mystify the reader, and put him in an amaze. Robert Conquest (1917-2015) • In 1956, an anthology of poems was published under the title of “New Lines” by Robert Conquest who began generally to be regarded as the most representative poet of the Movement. • It was Robert Conquest’s introduction to this anthology which largely encouraged the belief that this new poetry represented a reaction against the excesses of the romanticism of the 1940s. • In this introduction, Robert Conquest asserted that the poets of the nineteen- forties had produced poems marked by a diffuse and sentimental verbiage, while the new poets (of the nineteen-fifties) believed in a rational structure and intelligible language. • He further asserted that the poetry of the nineteen-fifties represented a new and healthy general stand-point, and the restoration of a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry. • The new poetry, he said, was free from both mystical and logical compulsions, and was empirical in its attitude to everything. • According to Robert Conquest, the new poetry (that is, the poetry of the Movement) was also characterized by anti-dogmatic attitudes and by a kind of aesthetic purity and philosophical detachment. • The chief target of Robert Conquest’s criticism of the poetry of the nineteen- forties was Dylan Thomas even though he was not named. • Conquest’s poems were published in various periodicals from 1937. In 1945 the PEN Brazil Prize for a war poem was awarded to his “For the Death of a Poet” – about an army friend, the poet Drummond Allison, killed in Italy and in 1951 he received a Festival of Britain verse prize. In 1955 and 1963 Conquest edited the influential New Lines anthologies, and in 1962-1963 he was literary editor of the London Spectator. 5 Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) • Poet, novelist, and critic Kingsley Amis was born in London, England in 1922. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. • This period also saw Amis as an anthologist, displaying a wide knowledge of all kinds of English poetry. The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), which he edited, was a revision of an original volume done by W. H. Auden. Amis took it in a markedly new direction: Auden had interpreted light verse to include "low" verse of working-class or lower-class origin, regardless of subject matter, while Amis defined light verse as essentially light in tone, though not necessarily simple in composition. • The Amis Anthology (1988), a personal selection of his favorite poems, grew out of his work for a London newspaper, in which he selected a poem a day and gave it a brief introduction. • In 2008, The Times ranked Kingsley Amis 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. • His important poems are: Bright November, A Frame of Mind, Poems: Fantasy Portraits, A Case of Samples: Poems 1946–1956, The Evans County, A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957–1967 and Collected Poems 1944–78 John Wain (1925 – 1994) • John Wain was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group known as "The Movement". His important poems are: A Word Carved on a Sill, Weep Before God, Wild track, Letters to Five Artists, poems, Feng, a poem, Poems 1949–79, Poems for the Zodiac, The Twofold, Open Country. • Wain is still known for his poetry (for example, his Apology for Understatement) and literary interests (contributions to The Observer), although his work is no longer as popular as it was. D. J. Enright (1920 –2002) • Dennis Joseph Enright was a British academic, poet, novelist and critic. He authored Academic Year (1955), Memoirs of A Mendicant Professor (1969) and a wide range of essays, reviews, anthologies, children's books and poems. 6 • He was the editor of the anthology, Poets of the 1950s. The Laughing Hyena and Other Poems, Bread Rather than Blossoms, The Year of the Monkey, Some Men Are Brothers, Addictions, Selected Poems are his important poems. Thom Gunn (1929-2004) • Thom Gunn was an English poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. • Fighting Terms, his first collection of verse, was praised by John Press, "This is one of the few volumes of postwar verse that all serious readers of poetry need to possess and to study." • He was a poet of violence and ‘Hemingway like muscularity.’ • His later poetry, The Sense of Movement and My Sad Captains show Byronic influence. • Gunn's poetry, together with that of Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and other members of The Movement, has been described as "...emphasizing purity of diction and a neutral tone...encouraging a more spare language and a desire to represent a seeing of the world with fresh eyes." Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) • Regarded as traditionalist rather than an innovator, Elizabeth Jennings is known for her lyric poetry and mastery of form.