Write the chief features of Movement poetry. Do you consider Philip Larkin a Movement poet?

Write the chief features of Movement poetry. Do you consider Philip Larkin a Movement poet?

The Name, “The Movement”, Given to the Work of a Group of Poets



The assistant literary editor of a periodical in England gave the name “The Movement” to the kind of poetry which was written by a few poets during the nineteen-fifties and which he found to be very different from the modernist poetry written in the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties.
This man invented the name “The Movement” in 1953 for the work of a number of poets who included Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Elizebeth Jennings, Thorn Gunn, Donald Davie, and D.J. Enright. Soon afterwards an anthology called “New Lines”, containing the work of these poets, appeared; and in it a number of poems by Larkin were also included. In the introduction to this anthology, its editor (Robert Conquest) wrote that these poems of the nineteen-fifties were vastly different from the poems which had been written in the preceding two decades. This new poetry, he wrote, did not submit to any great systems of theoretical constructs or to any agglomerations of unconscious commands. This new poetry, he further wrote, was free from both mystical and logical compulsions, and was empirical in its attitude to all things.


The Temperate Zone of the Movement’s Poetic Scene


Actually, the poets of the Movement were not an organized group with any well-defined and deliberately formulated aims shared by them all. The poetry of each member of this group differed in several ways from the poetry of every other member. All the same, there were certain features which were identified by critics as being common to the poetry of most of the members of this group. Questioned on this point, Larkin said that the members of this group did not have many artistic aims in common but that they agreed, in general, in things which they found funny or derisible. Larkin did not give any clear definition of the poetry of the Movement, though he did agree that certain features were common to the work of all the poets of this group. Talking about his own poetry, he emphasized the expository, documentary, empirical, and rational elements in his poems; and these qualities were evident in the work of other members of the group also. While Larkin gave high praise to the poetry of Thomas Hardy, he tried to discredit the work of the modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and even W.B. Yeats. Actually, Larkin had, in the beginning, been deeply influenced by the symbolist poetry of W.B. Yeats and of the French poets of the late nineteenth century. But subsequently he tried to shed this symbolist and modernist influence in favour of the kind of poetry that Thomas Hardy and other traditionalists had written...........................................

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