1 / 9
The 1950s and after
1 / 9
The 1950s and after
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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
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)
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
a
cloak of chaos. They were
men
who, I thought, lived only
to
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.
18 / 9
Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998)
poetry affirming the natural forces of vitality
the inseparability of beauty and brutality
the husband of Sylvia Plath
appointed Poet Laureate in 1984
20 / 9
The postwar quest
William Golding (1911 - 1993) Lord of the Flies
(1954) – a story about a group of boys on a desert
island, descending into barbarism
Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999) - The Sea, The Sea
(1978; Booker Prize) describes the obsessional
love of the narrator for his childhood sweetheart;
her novels often seem like dramatized
philosophical debates on the nature of good
and evil, on the conflict between rationality
and sexuality, and on free will and
determinism.
