Major Traits of Movement Poetry: A Critical Analysis

Abstract

The Movement as a literary trend emerged in Britain during the 1950s and its chief exponents included the writers like Kingsley Amis, John Holloway, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings and Donald Davie. Each decade of this century has thrown up a poetic idiom to match the times. 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 uses of high culture during this decade. The thirties also called the Auden decade, threw up a different kind of poetry marked by urgent political and social concerns. The idiom of the poetry of the thirties was largely informed by Marxism which believed that the modern writer should be conscious of his social, political and economic milieu and should not fail to reflect it in his works. The poets of the thirties reacted against those of the twenties by assessing that they had no time to be difficult or experimental. Thus, the political and economic dream of Auden and Mc. Neice replaced the cultural and mythical nostalgia of Yeats and Eliot. The forties came out with a new poetic idiom. This was supplied by Dylan Thomas. Here the reaction to Auden took the form of anti-intellectualism because Dylan Thomas and his followers believed in emotional, rhetorical and metaphoric kind of poetry. There was a sort of reaction to Eliot and his school. They renounced the 1920s and 1930s in favour of a new romanticism. But poetry after 1945 changed and kept pace with development in society. In October 1954, an article called 'In the Movement' published in The English Weekly magazine, The Spectator. It was a deliberately provocative, almost truculent account of certain tendencies which the writer of the article had noticed in the work of several young poets and novelists during that time. Since nobody was quite clear what it stood for, it was commonly referred to as 'The Movement '-- as J. D. scott named it. The present paper is devoted to highlight the advent of the Movement and its various literary aspects.