1 / 9

The 1950s and after

2 / 9

The influence of surrealism



Surrealism – a French literary and artistic

movement of the 1920s, aiming to liberate art

from the limitations of logic and reason



The New Apocalypse – a group of poets who

cohered closely as a movement from the

appearance in 1939 of The New Apocalypse: An

Anthology of Criticism, Poems and Stories, edited

by J. F. Hendry, until the later 1940s. influenced

by surrealist poetry in translation



David Gascoyne published A Short History of

Surrealism (1936)

3 / 9

Dylan Thomas (1914 -
1953)



initially the most distinguished of the New

Apocalypse poets,



Under Milk Wood (1954) a radio play for

BBC3, “an impression for voices, an

entertainment out of darkness, of the town I

live in,”, so that “you came to town as an

inhabitant of it.



a day in the life of a small fishing Welsh

village "Llareggub"

4 / 9

Do Not Go Gentle Into that
Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

5 / 9

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

6 / 9

Stevie Smith (1902 - 1971)

Not Waving but Drowning (1957)
poetry ranging from the charmingly whimsical

to the theologically serious; it frequently

displays her sometimes deeply ironic sense of

humour and is highly idiosyncratic in tone.

while most of her work rhymes, in a wide

variety of forms often suggesting an element

of improvisation, it is equally effective in the

free verse she occasionally employed

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8 / 9

“Thoughts about the
Person from Porlock”

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

9 / 9

“Thoughts about the
Person from Porlock”

He was weeping and wailing: I am finished,

finished,

I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.

It was not right, it was wrong,
But often we all do wrong.

10 / 9

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892 -
1978)

the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve
a founding member of the National Party of Scotland,

expelled from it in 1933 for being a communist,

expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain

for being a Scottish nationalist

interested in evolving a form of written Scots

adequate to the concerns of the twentieth century,

fusing Lowlands Scots, medieval Scottish and

Standard English

from the mid-1930 moved largely to Standard English

11 / 9

The Movement



a group of poets reacting in the 1950s against

“the tangled and pretentious neo-romanticism”

of the New Apocalypse (Ian Hamilton)



included Kingsley Amis (also a novelist), D. J.

Enright, Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin, Robert

Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings and others



D. J. Enright and Robert Conquest respectively

edited the group's principal anthologies, Poets

of the 1950s (1955) and New Lines (1956)

12 / 9

The Movement



their poetry was characterized by 'rational

structure and comprehensible language' and

'negative determination to avoid bad

principles' (Conquest’s introduction)



The poets were designated 'the New

Augustans'

13 / 9

Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985)



a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955

until his death



pessimistically sceptical outlook, dry wit,

colloquial tones, understated technical

virtuosity



Whitsun Weddings (1964)

14 / 9

“This Be the Verse”

15 / 9

Thom Gunn (1929 - 2004)

from the mid-1950s lived chiefly in California
associated with The Movement because of the

rational tone and the use of conventional

verse forms in his earlier work

in his later work he adopted syllabic verse, drew

from his experience of participation in the

alternative culture of the 60s, the gay scene

and later on the AIDS crisis of the 1980s

(addressed in his 1992 collection The Man

with Night Sweats)

16 / 9

“My Sad Captains” (1961)

One by one they

appear in

the darkness: a few

friends, and

a few with historical
names. How late they

start to shine!

but before they fade

they stand

perfectly embodied, all

the past lapping them like

cloak of chaos. They were

men

who, I thought, lived only

renew the wasteful force

they

spent with each hot

convulsion.

They remind me, distant

now.

17 / 9

“My Sad Captains”

True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.