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British Poetry

Notes

The entire genre of British war poetry is ably discussed in Paul Fussell’s The Great War
and Modern Memory and in Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and
English Culture.

7.2 The Poems

Siegfried Sassoon, How to Die; Wilfred Owen, Anthem for a Doomed Youth; Wilfred Owen, Dulce
et Decorum Est; Herbert Read, The Happy Warrior; W. N. Hodgson, Before Action; Wilfred Gibson,
Back; Philip Larkin, MCMXIV.

7.2.1 Movement Poets

The Movement was a term coined by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, in 1954 to describe
a group of writers including Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain,
Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, and Robert Conquest. The Movement was essentially English in
character; poets in Scotland and Wales were not generally included.
Thomas Blackburn, Edwin Brock, Hilary Corke, John Fuller, Francis Hope, Ted Hughes, Richard
Kell, Thomas Kinsella, Laurence Lerner, Edward Lucie-Smith, George MacBeth, James Michie,
Jonathan Price, Vernon Scannell, Anthony Thwaite, Hugo Williams.
The term Movement was coined by J. D. Scott in 1954 to refer to a group of poets including Kingsley
Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Robert Conquest
and of course, Philip Larkin. Together they marked the emergence of the petit-bourgeois provincial
intelligentsia, impatient of the Establishment but ultimately committed to neutrality. Indeed, there
was never an organised school of poets armed with manifestos and some of the lead figures even
denied a conscious involvement, though they appeared together in a number of anthologies and
radio programmes. Later, the term came to theorise a distinctive poetic sensibility. Essentially the
Movement was a reaction against the extreme romanticism and surrealist detachment of the New
Apocalyptics like Dylan Thomas. On the other hand, the Movement poets reconstructed
neoclassicism. According to John Press, it was “a general retreat from direct comment or involvement
in any political or social doctrine.” One way of accounting for the emergence of the Movement is to
see it as a part of the general post-war period of reconstruction. The thematic shift and the return to
traditional forms and rhythms therefore seem to be natural responses to a national mood of
rebuilding. One of the Movement poets, John Wain, once commented: “At such a time, when
exhaustion and boredom in the foreground are balanced by guilt and fear in the background, it is
natural that a poet should feel the impulse to build.” Another of them, Donald Davie, also echoed
the same thought: “We had to go back to basics.” The Movement poets sought to create an ordinary
brand of poetry. They preferred everyday pictures to sensational imagery, and prioritised a friendly,
colloquial tone over rhetorical complications. A lead figure of this group, Kingsley Amis, found
that they have placed poetry in between “the gardening and the cookery” instead of libraries and
seminar hall. Actually, Larkin was little annoyed by the academic sterility of much of Movement
poetry, and never actively promoted himself as one of the group. After reading Conquest’s draft
introduction to New Lines, Larkin privately reveals to him what should be his aesthetic theory: “I
feel we have got the method right – plain language, absence of posturings, sense of proportion,
humour, abandonment of the dithyrambic ideal–and are waiting for the matter: a fuller and more
sensitive response to life as it appears from day to day.”
Antithetical to Romanticism, Larkin rejects the famous dichotomy of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian
Urn.’ “I have always believed,” he writes, “that beauty is beauty, truth, that is not all ye know on

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