Movement (literature)
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- This article is about a specific literary movement - for other literary movements see Art movement
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 Alfred Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings and Robert Conquest. The Movement was essentially English in character; poets in Scotland and Wales were not generally included.
Although the name was essentially a publicists' concoction, it is used still as a shorthand for these and a few others, including Thom Gunn and John Holloway.
The Movement produced two anthologies: Poets of the 1950s (1955) (editor D. J. Enright, published in Japan) and New Lines (1956). Their tone is anti-romantic and rational. Conquest, who edited the New Lines anthology, described the connection between the poets as 'little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles.' These 'bad principles' are usually described as excess, both in terms of theme and stylistic devices. The polemic introduction to New Lines targeted in particular the 1940s poets, the generation of Dylan Thomas and George Barker — though not by name. A second New Lines anthology appeared in 1963, by which time The Movement was a spent force, in terms of fashion; the 'underground' in the shape of The Group, and the more American-influenced style of the Al Alvarez anthology The New Poetry having come to the fore. Apart from Larkin, it was hard at that point to identify a Movement poet by 'voice'.
Poets in the New Lines (1956) anthology
Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, John Wain.
Poets in the New Lines 2 (1963) anthology
All of the above, excepting John Holloway, together with: 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.