The Movement (literature)

The Movement was a term coined in 1954 by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, to describe a group of writers including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn and Robert Conquest. The Movement was quintessentially English in character; poets from other parts of the United Kingdom were not involved.

Description

Although considered a literary group, members of the Movement saw themselves more as an actual literary movement, with each writer sharing a common purpose. To these poets, good poetry meant simple, sensuous content and traditional, conventional and dignified form.

The Movement's importance includes its worldview, which took into account the collapse of the British Empire and the United Kingdom's drastically reduced power and influence over world geo-politics. The group's objective was to prove the importance of traditional English poetry, over the American-led innovations of modernist poetry. The members of the Movement were not anti-modernity but they were opposed to modernist literature, which was reflected in the Englishness of their poetry.

The Movement sparked the divisions among different types of British poetry. Their poems were nostalgic for an older England and filled with rural images of the decaying way of life in the villages as the English people moved away from the countryside and into urban ghettoization.

Representative collections

The Movement produced two anthologies, Poets of the 1950s (edited by D. J. Enright, published in Japan, 1955) and New Lines (edited by Robert Conquest, 1956).