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The Movement British Poets of the 1950s

Jerry Bradley

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Description:Groucho Marx’s maxim that he would never belong to a club that would have him as a member might be the unspoken motto of the nine British poets said to compose the Movement. It is not so much that they objected to the attributes ascribed to their poetry—a wry honesty, a spare coolness of style, a modesty and informality that eschewed symbolism, abstraction, and allegory—but that they rejected the notion of committing to any doctrine, particularly one defining a literary movement. As poet Robert Conquest remarked, “All we had in common was no more than a wish to avoid certain bad principles.”Unlike previous eras in British history, the 1950s had no one poet, no T.S. Eliot or W.B. Yeats, who embodied the spirit of the age. Conquest and his begrudging peers, among them such poets and sometime novelists and critics as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, represented the sensibility of a generation disenchanted with the romanticism and heroics—literary and otherwise—characterizing the years surrounding World War II.In this collective study of the lives and works of all nine Movement poets, Jerry Bradley explores the common bonds they preferred to deny. Most came from working-class families. All were educated in the privileged enclaves of Oxford or Cambridge, and a disdain for the pretentious intellectualism that such environments can breed became a cornerstone of their poetics. The poetry of Dylan Thomas typified the intense emotionalism they hoped to escape.But these poets were not merely reactionaries. Writing with the desire to bring poetry outside the confines of academia, they sought a poetic language that would be simple and clear and imbued it with lyricism and wit, even humor. They used it to explore universal themes with what is now acknowledged as a quintessentially modern point of view, never flinching from the disturbing truths they were bound to uncover. The nature of love, the value of religion, the experience of aloneness and loneliness, the problem of self-deceit, and the fear of death are variously considered in such volumes as Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived (1955), Donald Davie’s Brides of Reason (1955), Elisabeth Jennings’s A Way of Looking (1955), and D.J. Enright’s The Laughing Hyena (1953).Bradley never loses sight of the unique literary contribution each writer has made beyond the confines of the Movement. All but Larkin are still living and all have had long and productive careers, which Bradley traces from the 1940s to the present. Still, their hallmark, collectively and perhaps individually, remains the poetic style they almost casually devised during the 1950s. “While the majority of these nine writers have published a substantial body of literature other than poetry and while the characteristics of Movement verse are discernible in their fiction and criticism,” Bradley concludes, “their poetry remains their most important contribution.”We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Movement British Poets of the 1950s. To get started finding The Movement British Poets of the 1950s, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Pages: 191

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Twayne Publishers

Release: 2010

ISBN: 0805790896

Description: Groucho Marx’s maxim that he would never belong to a club that would have him as a member might be the unspoken motto of the nine British poets said to compose the Movement. It is not so much that they objected to the attributes ascribed to their poetry—a wry honesty, a spare coolness of style, a modesty and informality that eschewed symbolism, abstraction, and allegory—but that they rejected the notion of committing to any doctrine, particularly one defining a literary movement. As poet Robert Conquest remarked, “All we had in common was no more than a wish to avoid certain bad principles.”Unlike previous eras in British history, the 1950s had no one poet, no T.S. Eliot or W.B. Yeats, who embodied the spirit of the age. Conquest and his begrudging peers, among them such poets and sometime novelists and critics as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, represented the sensibility of a generation disenchanted with the romanticism and heroics—literary and otherwise—characterizing the years surrounding World War II.In this collective study of the lives and works of all nine Movement poets, Jerry Bradley explores the common bonds they preferred to deny. Most came from working-class families. All were educated in the privileged enclaves of Oxford or Cambridge, and a disdain for the pretentious intellectualism that such environments can breed became a cornerstone of their poetics. The poetry of Dylan Thomas typified the intense emotionalism they hoped to escape.But these poets were not merely reactionaries. Writing with the desire to bring poetry outside the confines of academia, they sought a poetic language that would be simple and clear and imbued it with lyricism and wit, even humor. They used it to explore universal themes with what is now acknowledged as a quintessentially modern point of view, never flinching from the disturbing truths they were bound to uncover. The nature of love, the value of religion, the experience of aloneness and loneliness, the problem of self-deceit, and the fear of death are variously considered in such volumes as Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived (1955), Donald Davie’s Brides of Reason (1955), Elisabeth Jennings’s A Way of Looking (1955), and D.J. Enright’s The Laughing Hyena (1953).Bradley never loses sight of the unique literary contribution each writer has made beyond the confines of the Movement. All but Larkin are still living and all have had long and productive careers, which Bradley traces from the 1940s to the present. Still, their hallmark, collectively and perhaps individually, remains the poetic style they almost casually devised during the 1950s. “While the majority of these nine writers have published a substantial body of literature other than poetry and while the characteristics of Movement verse are discernible in their fiction and criticism,” Bradley concludes, “their poetry remains their most important contribution.”We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with The Movement British Poets of the 1950s. To get started finding The Movement British Poets of the 1950s, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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The Movement British Poets of the 1950s

The Movement British Poets of the 1950s

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