Movements in post WWII British poetry


 * They turned away from the life of excitement and sensualism.
 * They were more interested in social and political affairs.

The Movement

 * One of the most important movements in post-war British poetry.
 * Three important anthologies D. J. Enright’s Poets of the 1950’s
 * Robert Conquest’s New lines
 * G. S. Frazer’s Poetry Now
 * Only a tenuous range of connections. By 1957 its coherent impulse was dissolving.
 * Led by Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, others: Donald Davie , Thom Gunn , Elizabeth Jennings , John Wain . They were mostly university teachers.
 * Sardonic, lucid and self-consciously ironic. Opposed to the romantic and apocalyptic tone of much 1940s poetry especially that of Dylan Thomas, W.S. Graham.
 * Meticulously crafted and witty. Controlled and commonsensical.
 * Philip Larkin, reacted against neoromantics in the 1950’s.
 * Post war Anglo-Saxon rationalism. Larkin’s poetry exemplifies it. Truthful language, very narrow English poet. Aware of the positive limitation of his language.
 * They faced the global conflicts and uncertainties of the cold War era. They tried to regain a sense of rational control with the tendency towards traditionalism and empirism.
 * In their formal convention, they were similar to the Neoclassical poets.

Philip Larkin
1922 – 1985

 The North Ship, 
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The most eminent poet of the group known as the ‘New Lines’ poets - The Movement, the 1950s, or the New Apocalypse.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Characterized by thoughtfulness, irony, self-doubt, humility, and the search for completely honest feeling. His poetry is not emotionally extravagant (not like Dylan Thomas), expressed feelings of postwar generation.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He was controversial, yet he was the voice of the generation.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Greatly admired Hardy, compared to Auden, he is not radical in form. After his death his letters were published and people didn’t like them. He was a kind of racist.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He wanted to free poetry from excessive insincere emotion.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> The Whitsun Weddings, 

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">High Windows

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The Less Deceived
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Two novels  Jill, A Girl in Winter 
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Book of essays Required Writing
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Passion for jazz music All What Jazz? A Record Diary

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Church Going - his most famous poem. He contemplates the modern loss of religious faith. Without any sentiment though. The first two stanzas form an anti-romantic, irreverent description of a church. He realizes that church was not worth stopping for. He wonders what we shall do with churches when they fall completely out of use. He is asking who will be that last person to use it as its original purpose was. He says he does not know what the dusty barn is for, but it pleases him to stand in silence.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">His first collection


 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The title may have many connotations. We can’t be sure what it means.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">“Stuff” - he knows nothing about churches. Like a comical figure. He is very conservative in some way while shocking in others.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">“Can't” - people talk and say what they think they are supposed to say, like hypocrisy, conventional wisdom.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">We ritualize our beliefs. It can never be obsolete.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> High Windows  - many poems reflect his concerns about death.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Tom Gunn

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Reaction on this rationalism – several ways
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">His poetry expressed activity, tension, a chaotic world, a constant move and restlessness.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He was fascinated by American pop-culture (Elvis Presley, motorcycles, drugs).

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">from the 60s on there are more primal passions.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Liverpool poets

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Important Irish poets

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">More voice from the 60s on. Not the voice of the generation.

Ted Hughes
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">1930 – 2000

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">works:  The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal , 
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">One of the liveliest poets writing in Britain since 1945.

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> Poems: 

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> Eat Crow 

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> Prometheus on his Crag, 

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> River, 

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> Flowers and Insects 


 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm"> Verse for children Meet My Folks, Earth Owl and Other Moon People
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Rather violent poetry appeared when English verse was dominated by the poets of the Movement. In contrast with these restrained, disillusioned, ironic and often urban poems. Hughes’s work explore and celebrated violence and the life of the unconscious. He was a key member of the ‘new poetry’ group.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Remarkable for his evocation of natural life, in particular of animals. Presented as alien and opposed to the civilized human consciousness, and for that reason, as in the poetry and prose of D. H. Lawrence. Peculiarly close to sub-rational instinct in the self.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Married the poet Sylvia Plath.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">On the death of John Betjeman in 1984 was made Poet Laureate.

Seamus Heaney
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">b. 1939

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">Punishment
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">An Irish poet and writer. From Catholic family. He moved to the Republic of Ireland.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">His early poetry is about nature, drawing on his upbringing as a farmer’s son. Is found in  Death of a Naturalist ,  Door into the Dark , and shows the influence of Ted Hughes.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">The political situation in Northern Ireland begins to be explored in  North, Field Work  from the standpoint of Heaney’s Catholic background. The strongly individualistic, meditative and solitary vein that marks the distance between his own outlook and that of sectarianism continues to be apparent in subsequent collections:  Station Island, The Haw Lantern, Seeing Things 
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.


 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">It is about a girl who committed adultery. They shaved her head, cauled her in tar, blindfolded, hung and drowned her naked. The punishment given to women in the ancient times of Northern Europe. Also about the punishment of Ireland in 1960s. Catholics were repressed. They started fighting for equality. Were attacked, presence of British army. Catholic women were punished for going out with British soldiers. It was public punishment.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">He sees her in the water and says he almost loves her, but would have cast stones as well.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">She is only a scapegoat. He understands the tribal revenge on her.
 * <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">It is about “bog” people - wet ground that produces peat moss. Bodies were preserved for centuries in bog in Scandinavia. He wrote poems about them. Northern Ireland is boggy.

Tony Harrison
<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">born 1937

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">- Early volumes  The Loiners, the Schools of Eloquence , 1978

<p style="margin-bottom:0cm">his subject matter – becoming distances through education from his working-class. Northern upbringing. Intensely felt a sense of loss. =Newcastle is Peru,= =Bow Down,= =The Common Chorus= <p style="margin-bottom:0cm">translated Aeschylus’s Oresteia and French drama for the theatre