The Movement Poets

A parallel crusade in poetry to the effort of Angry Young Men in fiction during the decade of the 1950’s was that of the Movement Poets. This, too, was conscious and deliberate just as its counterpart movement was in fiction. In 1955, a number of verse manifestoes found publication from the members of the group known as the Movement. These manifestoes were published in D.J. Enright’s anthology, Poets of the 1950’s, which included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, etc. Amis made the following announcement:
Nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galleries or mythology or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope nobody wants them. Larkin’s reaction to “Modernism” is no less violent: I have no belief in “tradition” or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets.... To me the whole of the ancient world, the whole of classical and biblical mythology meant very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writer’s duty to be original.
As Robert Conquest contended, the Movement was “empirical in its attitude to all the cosmos.” On the one hand, it was a reaction against the mythical new classicism of the 1920’s, on the other, it was opposed to the neo-romanticism of the 1940’s. It was, one could surmise, a sort of realism, which aimed at consciously narrow concerns of here and now, addressing the world of everyday engagements, closing all windows on the outside world both in time and space. The Movement poets shut their eyes to whatever lurked beyond the tangible present and the mundane multitude. The very dull and drab, morbid and monotonous life of the uneventful men and matters were chosen as the subject-matter of poetry. After the War, which was between the European nations primarily, the reaction to Continentalism of the Modernists sounded perhaps unpatriotic. So, there is, for sure, this nationalist aspect also to the Movement philosophy of new aesthetics. As Calvin Bedient puts it, “The English poetic ‘Movement’ of the Fifties (the very name suggesting an excess of dull plainness) did much to fix the image of contemporary British poetry as deliberately deficient, moderate with a will. This image is gradually frayed and will probably give way altogether, for the truth is that, however deliberate — and after a faltering start — postwar poetry in Britain and Ireland has proved increasingly robust, varied, responsive to the times, felicitous, enjoyable.” Thus, the anti-modernism of Larkin and his fellow poets reflected the Postmodernist spirit of problematising Modernism. Their postmodernism involves a going beyond modernism.

Philip Larkin

The poet chosen by common consent as the most significant of the Movement poets is Philip Larkin (1922-1985). He still remains the best known of the group. His poetic works include The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974). It has been rightly remarked that “English poetry has never been so persistently out of the cold as it is with Philip Larkin.” The following extract from his “Wild Oats” will illustrate the remark at once:
About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked -
A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and 1 doubt
If ever one had like her:
But it was the friend I took out,

This shows a good deal of Larkin—plain and bare as wood, matter-of-fact, not entirely a mind of winter, with a slight sense of homour. Larkin represents the post-War mood of depression. As he says in his novel Jill (1946), “events cut us ruthlessly down to size.” His other novel is A Girl in Winter (1947).
Larkin has something of both Frost and Hardy in him, writing small poems on small affairs of life, sharing their scepticism, even nihilism at times, but always reassuring in his love for the very ordinary things of life. Note, for instance, the following:
‘This was Mr. Bleaney’s room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Such small things, studded with care on the small canvas, came out with a certain care for the small and the underdog. His lyricism and lucidity are never lost in the dense detail of his little descriptions. These two qualities always come out:
I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold bill of stars.

Thus, Larkin served his generation of the post-War with the soothing balm of little concerns, focusing on the immediate so that the disturbing outside world could be kept subsided at the back of one’s mind. His poetry, no wonder, became the truly representative of the post-War outlook on life and cosmos. Larkin’s tirade against the metanarratives of modernism is one form of Postmodernism that emerged in the 1950’s.

Donald Davie

Another “Movement” poet, Donald Davie (b. 1922), came out with his own brand of “commonality” (if realism has historically an old ring), quite different from Larkin’s. He lays a good deal of emphasis on “unbanity,” which Larkin rather repudiated. Davie wants reality to appear in his work, not “in some new form,” but in its most familiar form, its morally guaranteed form—in fact, as “moral commonplace.” However, as Calvin Bendient has observed, “But the truth is that reality does not appear in his work at all. Seen from ‘the center,’ reality falls into the blind spot in the middle of the eye. No longer Appearance, it becomes a storehouse of signs, of which the meanings are moral abstractions.” Davie has a very pronounced, as well as announced, polemical “urbane” poetic programme, very much like (his most admired) the Augustans. As he argues, linguistic urbanity lies in “the perfection of a common language.” Using Arnold’s phrase, Davie insists, that the object of urbanity is to voice “the tone and spirit of the center.” No wonder that he wrote his critical book Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952).
Davie’s attempt, therefore, is to have a style as transparent as water, but also as pure. Decidedly, to achieve that goal a lot of “ore” of reality will have to be removed from the pure metal, and so Davie does. Note, for instance, the following, from “Tunstall Forest”:
...the tense
Stillness did not come,
The deer did not, although they fed
Perhaps nearby that day,
The liquid eye and elegant head
No more than a mile away.

Some other notable poems of Davie include “The Cypress Avenue,” “After an Accident.” A critical book, Articulate Energy, pleads for a “story sense” in poetry, which again is an Arnoldian emphasis. An interesting poem of Davie (recalling Joyce and Thomas) is “Portrait of the Artist as a Farmyard Fowl,” where the monologue proceeds on such a pace as the following:
A conscious carriage must become a strut;
Fastidiousness can only stalk
And seem at last not even tasteful but
A ruffled hen too apt to squawk.

Davie’s notable works include Six Epistles to Eva Hesse (1970), The Forests of Lithuania (1959), A Winter Talent (1957) and Events and Wisdoms (1964): while some more notable poems include “Creon Mouse,” “North Dublin,” “Cherry Ripe,” “A Meeting of Cultures,” “New York in August,” “In California,” “The Prolific Spell,” “Viper Man,” etc. His attempt always remained to sing and to keep his song lean, devoid of all history and mythology because that was the “character” of the post-War era. But there is, for sure, an integrity in his leanness which, the more one reads his poetry, the more one learns to admire. His work finally, slowly and steadily, that is, has become broader, but without sacrificing its innate purity.

Robert Conquest and D.J. Enright

Still another of the group of poets covered under the term “Movement” is Robert Conquest (b. 1917), whose poetry is largely devoted to the depiction of landscape; of course, with man, as in Wordsworth, as an integral part of nature. The subject-matter, in the true spirit of the “Movement,” remains reality, that is, the commonplace, but his approach is rather intellectual. Some of his notable verse appears in his volumes entitled Poems (1955), Between Mars and Venus (1962), and Arias for a Love Opera (1969). One more of the core group, so to say, of the “Movement,” is J.D. Enright (b. 1920), who is known, not so much by his own poems as by his edited work, Poets of the 50‘s (1955). His own poems are included in his Language Hyena (1953), Some Men are Brothers (1960), and The Old Adam (1965). His poetry has for its subject the individual man, just as in Larkin, in all his conditions, treating his suffering with sympathy, also with indignation. But he always upholds individual dignity, reiterates strong faith in it. His language, also like Larkin’s, is derived from colloquial speech, stripped of all elaborations. His is a style marked by ironical disgust of hypocrisy and cruelty.

Charles Tomlinson

A notable poet of the post-War period, perhaps the most considerable British poet, is Charles Tomlinson (b. 1927). Like the other poets of the period he, too, is committed to some sort of realism, the world of empirical realities. However, each of these poets have their individual versions of reality. In Tomlinson’s case, he can be called a poet of exteriority and its human correspondences. His outwardness, however, need not be confused with superficiality. His principal theme, in his own words, is “the fineness of relationships.” One can see something of Wordsworth in him, his wise passivity, his reflections within the bounds of reality. The power of message and healing of his poetry remains central in most of his compositions. Note, for instance, the following from “The Gossamers”:
Autumn. A haze is gold
By definition. This one lit
The thread of gossamers
That webbed across it
Out of shadow and again
Through rocking spaces which the sun
Claimed in the leafage. Now
I saw for what they were
These glitterings in grass, on air,
Of certainties that ride and plot
The currents in their tenuous stride
And, as they flow, must touch
Each blade and, touching, know
Its green resistance. Undefined
The haze of autumn in the mind
Is gold, is glaze.

Clearly, mind is light, and like the light it is a wealth, but also like the wealth, it makes wealth of objects that it reflects upon. His poetry consists of several volumes that came out at different dates, namely, Relations and Contraries (1951), The Necklace (1955), Seeing is Believing (1958), A Peopled Landscape (1962), American Scenes (1966), The Way of the World (1969), Written on Water (1972), The Way In and Other Poems (1974), The Flood (1981), The Return (1987), The Door m the Wall (1992) and Jubilation (1995). In Tomlinson’s case, contemplation seems to be the fulfilment of being, just as it does in the case of Wallace Stevens. Like the other poets of the Movement Group, he, too, recalls us to the life of the moment conceived as an end in itself. Here, the Movement gains the meaning of flux, reality that is marked by movement, by change.

R.S. Thomas

A notable Welsh poet after Dylan Thomas is Ronald Stuart Thomas (b. 1913), although not as well-known and established as his senior compatriot. His poetry is both sensual as well as sensitive, which quickly engages both eye and emotion equally intensely. Note, for instance, the following from “Ninetieth Birthday”:
And there at the top that old woman,
Born almost a century back
In that stone farm, awaits your coming;
Waits for the news of the lost village.
She thinks she knows, a place that exists
In her memory only.

One feels tempted to cite Calvin Bendient’s comment on the poem, which has a charm of its own: “How direct, naked, human, and sociable this is. Has Thomas not heard of ‘modern’ poetry and its difficulty? Has he no embarrassment before the primary emotions? Never mind; nothing vital is missing from such a poem. Reading Thomas one learns to endure the glare of emotion; one learns again a kind of innocence.” Thomas, evidently, shares with the poets of the 1950’s their key emphases on simple, clean, and clear diction; direct and straight syntax; no use of mythology or tradition; no reliance on ambiguity or paradox.
Thomas has to his credit several volumes of poems, including The Stones of the Field (1946), Not That He Brought Flowers (1969), Song at the Year’s Turning (1955), The Bread of Truth, and Pieta (1966), Laboratories of the Spirit (1975), The Echoes Return Show (1988), Counterpoint (1990) and Mass for Hard Times (1992). His poetry is strongly marked as much by moral quality as by aesthetic. The theme may be love or anger, his poem is invariably directed at an entire people. There is, in that sense, something of Whitman in Thomas, without, of course, the former’s bombastic optimism. He is rather hardened and narrowed Whitman, although not without broad sympathy, especially for the peasants. Note, for instance, the following:
I am the farmer, stripped of love
And thought and grace by the land’s hardness;
But what I am saying over the fields’
Desolate acres, rough with dew,
Is, Listen, listen, I am a man like you...

Some of the memorable poems of Thomas include “Green Categories,” “The Gap in the Hedge,” “A Peasant,” “The Airy Tomb,” “Death of a Peasant,” “Portrait,” “Absolution,” and “Walter Llywarch.” Writing about the repressed and marginalized (peasants have been one such class) is in keeping with the philosophy of Postmodernism.

THE NON-MOVEMENT POETS

Ted Hughes

Famous for his animal poetry, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) earned the reputation of being the first English poet of the “will to live.” His choice of animals as the themes of his poems is, of course, not without the reverse side of his choice. The reverse side is as much of a disenchantment with the world of mankind as there is an enchantment with the world of animal kind. He was highly influenced by the German philosopher, Schopenhauer, the only one, he says, he “ever really read.” The philosopher in question believed, “the whole and every individual bears the stamp of a forced condition.”
Ted Hughes can be appropriately said to be the poet of that condition, and in that role, he is rather a hangman than a priest. Hughes once revealed, “My interest in animals began when I began. My memory goes back pretty clearly to my third year, and by then I had so many of the toy lead animals you could buy in shops that they went right round our flat-topped fireplace fender, nose to tail....” Later, he had live experience with them in the fields, feeling them crawling under the lining of his coat.
In his poetry, animals are presented, not as playthings, but as lords of life and death. They assume the status of mythical gods. They are presented superior to men, with their lack of self-consciousness, and sickness of the mind. They are found free from inhibitions, hesitations, fears; and full of courage and concentration. With their focused life, with all the innocence of man’s corruptions, they emerge, like Adam and Eve in Paradise, in a state before the Fall. His very first volume of poems, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), illustrated all these ideas, and made him famous as a poet. Note, how man is placed below the animal in the hierarchy Hughes builds up in his poems:
I drown in the drumming ploughland. I drag up Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth, From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye...
His other volumes of poems include Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Crow Wakes (1971), Eat Crow (1972), Cave Birds (1975), Season Songs (1976), Moortowm (1979), Wolf-watching (1989), Shakespeare and the Goddess of Being (1992) - a prose work, Tales from Ovid (1997), and Birthday Letters(1998). The last, published just a short while before his death, is a sequence of poems about his bitter-sweet relations with his wife, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963. Although composed much earlier, he chose to make them public near his own end.

Tom Gunn

Although he had been included in the Movement authologies along with Larkin, Tom Gunn (b. 1929) sharply departed from the group and took his individual course. He had resolved rather early in his career to seek out the heroic in the experience of nihilism. He writes about various forms of driving power which characterize our cities, as also about self-destructive violence. No doubt, he views human existence as full of pain and suffering, lovelessness and meaninglessness, but he still finds solace in the tenderness of man’s essentially animal nature. His very first volume of poems, Fighting Terms (1954), startled the readers. One notices in these poems his love and admiration for a certain masculinity, a type of manly energy, which is rather aggressive. His situations measure up to the existentialist or Sartrean dimensions. His other volumes of poetry include The Sense of Movement (1957), My Sad Captains (1961), Touch (1967), Moly (1971), Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), The Passages of Joy (1982) and The Man With Night Sweats(1992). Those more sympathetic to him have compared him, because of his logical and economical style, studded with startling imagery, with John Donne. But there are others less sympathetic who find him often committed to a kind of nihilistic glamour for which, it is alleged, he is not able to convincingly apologise. The most unsympathetic of the better known critics is Vyor Winters who observes that “as a rule, he has a dead ear, and the fact makes much of his work either mechanical or lax in its movement.” Both Ted Hughes and Tom Gunn, by glorifying animals or animal-energy in man, with sardonic humour spared for mankind, reflect the Postmodernist inglorious conception of human nature.

Seamus Heaney

An Irish by birth, and acutely conscious of his country’s long history of hostility towards England, Seamus Heaney (1939-2000) counted himself among the “colonials.” But he was fully conscious of his divided inheritance: “I speak and write in English,” he writes in an article (dated 1972), “but do no altogether share the preoccupations and perspectives of an Englishman...and the English tradition is not ultimately home. I live off another hump as well.” That other “hump,” we know, is no other but Ireland, or more precisely the rural Ulster, which, like the Wessex of Thomas Hardy, occupies a central place in his poetry. Heaney’s poetic volumes include Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Preoccupations (1980), Station Island (I984), The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), Sweeney’s Flight (1992) and The Spirit Level (1996). Heaney has been known as a peasant as well as a patriotic poet of Ireland. He depicts both farm activities as well as the colonial imperial effects on his countrymen. In a poem called “At a Potato Digging,” for instance, he writes:
Flint-white, purple, they lie scattered
like inflated pebbles. Native
to the black hutch of clay
where the halved seed hot and clothed
these knobbled and slit-eyed tubers seem
the petrified hearts of drills. Split
by the spade, they show white as cream.

Similarly, in “North,” he depicts, with a backward glance, the buried sorrows and treasures of the Irish people as well as of their language, concluding with an advice:
‘Lie down
in the word-board, burrow
in the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear
As the bleb of the icicle,
Trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.

Thus, poetry of the post-War, post-modern, or contemporary period, born out of the aftermath of the war devastation caused to cities and psychies alike, remained rather tame, compared to the highbrow modernist poetry. It deliberately chose to remain level, everyday, matter of fact, narrow, and, like the poetry of Hardy and Frost, solid and specific, serious and cynical. It contented itself with the micro rather than macro narratives, minute rather than meta concerns, national rather than international scenes, simple rather than difficult style, direct rather than indirect address.


(Continued)

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There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.