Let's Have Some Poetry By Elizabeth Jennings Analysis

Elizabeth Jennings was likewise tending to play down the idea of the Movement among a particular generation of postwar poets and in this reference she says: “They may have common aims - but this is something very different from that deliberate practice and promulgation of shared views which a true literary movement implies.” (10) Further she argues that: “it is the journalists, not the poets themselves, who have created the poetic movements of the Movements” (10).Talking about the poetry of the fifties and the Movement in her book Let’s Have some Poetry (1960) Jennings herself says that: “What is certain, however, is that there are no such things as poetic “schools” or poetic “movements” today, much as many critics would like to think so. A
He believed that it was an effective piece of stage management but he himself cannot avoid using the label (Hewison 86).His essential point is that the attitudes of the Movement poets reflects the restrictive conditions of the Cold War. The neutrality, caution and self-limitation of these writers belong to the mood of fear and suspicion created by the continuing opposition among military and diplomatic forces of East and West after 1945. In this reference he comments that: “The cold war tended to freeze public attitudes, and counseled silence about the private ones. It recommended a guarded private life, in which only small gestures were possible, gestures chiefly about the difficulty of making a gesture. Hence the concern of the Movement poets was with the problems of perception and express.” (22) As Hewison points out, literary history alone does not provide an enough account for what prompted the Movement and determined the kind of poetry it looked for. It was part of postwar social formation where heightened rhetoric and heightened emotion were likely to be regarded as
In his book The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the1950s Blake Morrison asserts not only that the Movement existed but that it was a literary group of substantial importance (Morrison 60).
If the Movement did not exist as a rational literary group, it certainly operated as a noteworthy cultural influence; it was a product of specific views about literature and society, which in turn it helped to establish and circulate. Those critics who have disputed the idea of the Movement as a well organized group with a clear and consistent programme of ideas have nevertheless recognized among its supposed members a shared set of values and suppositions intimately related to the moods and conditions of postwar England.
Neil Corcoron goes so far as to assert that the preference for traditional forms and methods was a part of determined effort to rebuild the intellectual culture of the postwar years. She argues that: “Syntax, measure and a logic of statement were, in the Movement poem, almost an act of postwar reconstruction: to build the decorous shape of the poem was to provide a defense against barbarism” (Corcoran