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Poetry since 1945
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forces of birth, sex, and death, and with a rhapsodic regret for all that is lost
in death. His best poems affirm with great passion and vigour the joys and
beauties of life, even in the midst of death. In a famous poem to his dying
father, written in the form of a villanelle, Thomas urges him to resist:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Much of modern poetry continues Dylan Thomas’s affirmation of life
over death, particularly poignant in the nuclear age of post-war writing.
John Betjeman was immensely popular as a poet. His Selected Poems
(1948) brought him considerable attention, although he had been
publishing poetry since 1930 and was close to the Auden Group. A
passionate defender of Victorian architecture and heritage, he wrote witty
poetry which had public appeal and dealt with everyday subjects, for
example Sudden Illness at the Bus-Stop, with sympathy and concern. He
came to be identified as a representative middle-brow voice of the present,
adjusting to the past. His verse autobiography Summoned by Bells (1960)
became a bestseller and was followed by an expanded Collected Poems
(1962). There is an underlying melancholy in Betjeman’s best work which
relates him closely to Philip Larkin, who was one of his greatest admirers,
and in many ways his successor in the depiction of modern urban life.
At the same time as the angry young man was appearing in novels and
plays, poetry took on a new tone with The Movement. Although it was
short-lived, and was never very homogeneous as a group, its aim to rid
poetry of high-flown Romanticism and bring it down to earth can be seen
to have been realised in the work (most notably) of Philip Larkin, and of
Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, and Elizabeth Jennings. Their work deliberately
contrasted both with the high emotion and verbal effusion of Dylan Thomas
and with the Modernist tradition of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The novelists
Kingsley Amis and John Wain were also associated with The Movement in
the mid-1950s, notably in the 1956 anthology, New Lines. A Way of Looking
(1955) by Elizabeth Jennings contains in its title something of what the
group represented – a different way of perceiving the world – but she
cannot really be grouped with the others. Most of her poetry is of personal
suffering and struggle, rather than the detached, slightly ironic writing of
the more socially acute poets such as Larkin.