374. DSC 201: The Movement of the 1950s (1)

The 1950s was a decade that began on January 1, 1950, and ended on December 31, 1959.

The Movement was a term coined in 1954 by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, to describe a group of writers namely Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Robert Conquest, and John Holloway.

 The Movement was quintessentially English in character; poets from other parts of the United Kingdom were not involved. It has been a small group of young, lower-middle-class, anti-experimental writers. It saw the rise of backlash against modernism and against New Romanticism and can be seen as an aggressive, sceptical, patriotic backlash against the cosmopolitan elites of the 1930s and 1940s. The poets in the group rejected modernism, avant-garde experimentation, romanticism and the metaphorical fireworks of poets such as Dylan Thomas. Their verse was ironical, down to earth, unsentimental and rooted in a nostalgic idea of English identity. 

Timeline

The 1950s was a decade marked by the post-World War II boom, the dawn of the Cold War and the civil rights movement in the United States. “America at this moment,” said the former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1945, “stands at the summit of the world.”

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 dignified form.

Throughout the decade, the world continued its recovery from World War II, aided by the post-World War II economic expansion. The period also saw great population growth with increased birth rates and the emergence of the baby boomer generation. Despite this recovery, the Cold War developed from its modest beginnings in the late 1940s to a heated competition between the Soviet Union and the United States by the early 1960s. The ideological clash between communism and capitalism dominated the decade, especially in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Movement

The Movement was a group of writers including Philip Larkin, Kingsley

Amis, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, John Wain, D J Enright and

Robert Conquest. The Movement was essentially English in character as

poets from other parts of the United Kingdom were not involved.

After the end of the Second World War (1939-1945), British public started to have a

normal prosperous life. The war took a toll on everything and five years after its end,

people started to have a normal life. Food rations ended; medical care improved,

economical welfare was almost at hand. So life was healing from the pains of the war

and people were in the process of forgetting the atrocities of the war. They were about

to put the war behind.

Even though life was improving on many levels, the arts, however, and literature and

theatre in particular, were in a rut. The literature produced was dominated by the

ideas and sentiments of the ore-war times and neither poetry nor novel could reflect

the change that took place because of the war. Poets, novelists and dramatists showed

a reluctance to let go of Britain‘s imperial past and an obsession with class held sway.

A radical shake-up was needed. Literature needed to get angry.

The title for the group was coined in 1954 by the literary editor of the spectator, J. D.

Scott, who referred to ‗this new movement of the fifties‘. Recently, the notion of the

movement has come in for criticism. Some see it as a fraud, an artificial construct

created by the press to counter the arguments that English literature was in decline

and overshadowed by American popular culture. Even the poets grouped under The

Movement such as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis refused to be identified as

Movement writers. However, the term caught on, and by rejecting the complexities of

modernism the group helped return poetry to a wider readership.

The main features of The Movement Verse are as follows:

1. It is ironical, down to earth, unsentimental and rooted in a nostalgic idea of

English identity.

2. European sympathies were regarded as unmistakable signs of intellectual

pretentiousness and moral turpitude. For some critics and readers, the poets‘

approach understandably evokes a narrow-minded Little Englandism.

The Movement – were Oxbridge-educated, white, predominantly male (Jennings was

the only woman in the group, and she was a late arrival), middle-class, Europhobic

and for the most part heterosexual. Even so, they caught the mood of their time, and

Larkin and Amis in particular are undeniably major figures in English literature.

The Movement produced two anthologies, Enright‘s Poets of the 1950s (1955) and

Conquest‘s New Lines (1956).

The Movement was succeeded in the 1960s by “The Group”.