The Movement

==Background==
Britain in the years immediately following World War Two was beginning to move forwards once again. The National Health Service began offering comprehensive health care for all in 1948. The Festival of Britain, held in 1951, celebrated the nation’s heritage and looked ahead to an exciting future. The weariness caused by war was receding, the rationing of food was becoming a thing of the past and financial aid from America was helping the country to rebuild.
The arts, however, and literature and theatre in particular, were in a rut. The cosy drawing-room dramas of the pre-war era still dominated the stage, and in 1954 a series of articles in the The Observer asked ‘Is the novel dead?’ On both the stage and the page 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.
Deeply English in outlook, the Movement was a gathering of poets including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, John Wain, D J Enright and Robert Conquest. The Movement 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. 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). Buzwell, Greg. "The 1950s: English Literature's Angry Decade." British Library. 7 September 2017, www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/the-1950s-english-literatures-angry-decade 
==Characteristics==
The central viewpoint in their poems is an ‘I’, a single voice, recording experiences directly and shaping them in generally traditional poetic forms. Carter, Ronald, and John McRae. The Routledge History of Literature in English. Routledge, 2002. 
The common assumption is that the Movement was largely a reaction against the inflated romanticism of the 1940s, a victory of common sense and clarity over obscurity and mystification, of verbal restraint over stylistic excess: in short, the virtues of Philip Larkin over those of Dylan Thomas. Roberts, Neil. The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry. 2001. Blackwell, 2003. 
==Main Referents==
*Philip Larkin
*Kingsley Amis
*Elizabeth Jennings
*Thom Gunn
*John Wain
*D J Enright
*Robert Conquest
==Sources==