Movement Poetry & Philip Larkin as a Movement Poet

Movement Poetry

&

Philip Larkin as a Movement Poet

                                                -ARGHAJIT CHAKRABORTY

T

he term Movement was coined by J. D. Scott in 1954 to refer to a group of poets including Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Robert Conquest and of course, Philip Larkin. Together they marked the emergence of the petit-bourgeois provincial intelligentsia, impatient of the Establishment but ultimately committed to neutrality. Indeed, there was never an organised school of poets armed with manifestos and some of the lead figures even denied a conscious involvement, though they appeared together in a number of anthologies and radio programmes. Later, the term came to theorise a distinctive poetic sensibility. 

Essentially the Movement was a reaction against the extreme romanticism and surrealist detachment of the New Apocalyptic like Dylan Thomas. On the other hand, the Movement poets reconstructed neoclassicism. According to John Press, it was "a general retreat from direct comment or involvement in any political or social doctrine." The Movement writings clearly reflect a startling transformation in the poetic ideology and it is evident in an anonymous leading article, “In the Movement” which appeared in the London weekly periodical, The Spectator edited by J.D. Scott on 1^st October 1954.

 
One way of accounting for the emergence of the Movement is to see it as a part of the general post-war period of reconstruction. The thematic shift and the return to traditional forms and rhythms therefore seem to be natural responses to a national mood of rebuilding. One of the Movement poets, John Wain, once commented: "At such a time, when exhaustion and boredom in the foreground are balanced by guilt and fear in the background, it is natural that a poet should feel the impulse to build." Another of them, Donald Davie, also echoed the same thought: "We had to go back to basics." The Movement poets sought to create an ordinary brand of poetry. They preferred everyday pictures to sensational imagery, and prioritised a friendly, colloquial tone over rhetorical complications. A lead figure of this group, Kingsley Amis, found that they have placed poetry in between "the gardening and the cookery" instead of libraries and seminar hall.

Larkin established himself as a poet of high esteem in the galaxy of the Movement writers. He rose as a poet on the literary scene in the post-War British era with the characteristics of the Movement poetry apart from the distinctive poetic features of his own. The attitudes and some of the craft strategies of the Movement writers influenced Larkin in the evolution of his poetic vision and sense of craft. Larkin also in turn influenced the writers of the Movement group and those of coming generations.

The Movement group of writers shared some similar views about the kind of poetry which became a herald of the new era in the post-War period of British poetry that was in the mid 1950s. The poetry of Larkin and other Movement writers eclipsed both the politically committed poetry of the 1930s and the neo-Romantic surrealism of the poetry of the 1940s. These writers shared similar opinion about poetry as also similar concerns with jazz. Their tutor, Gavin Bone, influenced them in several ways and they consequently developed their interest in clarity, simplicity and intelligibility which are the primary characteristics of Movement writings in contrast with those of Modernists writings. It first attracted attention with the publication of the anthology New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Among its writers were Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie and Thom Gunn. Conquest saw the group's work "free from both mystical and logical compulsions and - like modern philosophy - is empirical in its attitude to all that comes."

As poet Larkin made his debut with the collection The North Ship in 1945, written with short lines and carefully worked-out rhyme schemes. It was published with his own expense and showed the influence of Yeats. It was followed by two novels, Jill (1946), a coming-of-age story, and A Girl in the Winter (1947), after which he abandoned fiction. "I tried very hard to write a third novel for about five years,” he later said, "the ability to do so had just vanished."

“Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.”
(From 'Next, Please', 1955)

In The Whitsun Weddings the title-poem describes the poet's journey by train from Hull to London. Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter. In the 1950s, British tax law made the Whitsun weekend a financially advantageous time to be married:

"Just long enough to settle hats and say

I nearly died,

A dozen marriages got under way.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side."

 Larkin used the tones and rhythms of ordinary speech, and focused on the urban landscape of the industrial north.

"Canals with floatings of industrial froth;

 A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

 And rose: and now and then a smell of grass

 Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth

 Until the next town, new and nondescript,

 Approached with acres of dismantled cars."

High Windows (1974) includes two substantial poems about ageing, illness and death, 'The Old Fools' and 'The Building'. In these works Larkin explored the mood of post-war England and its bleak views of the future. “Deprivation is to me what daffodils are to Wordsworth,” was Larkin's famous confession. Larkin avoided "big" words, sentimentality and philosophising, his language was plain, his approach was cool and restricted, which led critics to accuse him of lack of emotional involvement.

Antithetical to Romanticism, Larkin rejects the famous dichotomy of Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. "I have always believed," he writes, "that beauty is beauty, truth truth, that is not all ye know on earth nor all ye need to know." He thus briskly separates the realms that Keats held in ambiguous balance. Larkin often discouraged all sorts of comparative readings, yet 'The Whitsun Weddings' may be viewed as a searching revaluation of the Keatsian odes. Keats's stanzas are autonomous and focus on different aspects of the urn sequentially, while their invocatory openings except the second stanza convey a sense of starting afresh every time. The Keatsian stanzas in 'The Whitsun Weddings' differ from those in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ both rhythmically and thematically. Instead of varied sestets, Larkin's evenly rhymed stanzas with the a b a b c d e c d e pattern as well as the enjambement take on the reader unstopping like the narrator's journey by the train. Keats held beauty as timeless. Larkin's poem is rooted in a specific time and is also aware of its flow: "That Whitsun, I was late getting away." Paradoxical to the Romantic sensuousness, our organs are here smothered by hot cushions, blinding windscreens and stinking fish-docks. Later the noise of "whoops and skirls" irritates our auditory perception, strikingly in contrast to the "unheard melodies" of Romantic literature. And above all, Larkin's view of marriage as a "happy funeral" and a "religious wounding" strongly destabilizes the Romantic creed of "More happy love! More happy, happy love!" In 'High Windows', too, Larkin is not romanticising the amorous attitude of young people like Keats. He prefers to simply narrate it, as if it is nothing ceremonial, and uses colloquial words from day to day sex life:

"When I see a couple of kids

And guess he is fucking her and she's

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm"

In fact, it is difficult to find a complex syntax or an unusual word in Larkin's poetry. His pen-picture of English suburbs with "industrial froth" and "acres of dismantled cars", and the occasional portraits of the verdurous countryside in 'The Whitsun Weddings' are quite familiar to the common English reader. 'The Explosion' is also very colloquial and picturesque in its depiction of humdrum mortals like the miners. The outward structure of 'Water' and 'Days' are almost like nursery rhymes, however subtle philosophy they may convey inwardly. Larkin thus breaks the barrier between the poet and the general reader, as Amis observes in 'A Bookshop Idyll’. "Life as it appears from day to day" thus comes again and again in Larkin's poetry. He is neither existentialist nor romantic; from a neutral point he writes what he says in a plain language for the non-specialist recipient, which is the ultimate credo of the Movement poetry.

Larkin’s poetic sensibilities was bound to be transformed because of his affinities with the Movement and his poetry reflects his great concern with the general characteristics of the Movement writers as follows:

1.      The Movement poets portray the element of time and its effects on life. They employ time as the most significant concept. Larkin mainly considers time as man’s element as in “Days”: “Days are where we live”. The Movement poets deal with time in different ways in contrast with the modernist poets like Eliot.

2.      Larkin observes the post-War British life that welcomes changes in all walks of life in the governance of time and shares social concerns of the post-War British society like the Movement poets in different sociological backgrounds.

3.      Larkin’s poetry establishes the consciousness of social differences or of class distinctions on the basis of social or physical status in Movement poetry. It is evident in Larkin’s “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”-

        “Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole…/That this is a real girl in a real place.”

4.      Larkin’s poetry has a common man as its speaker to narrate his feelings and experiences to a common man. We find man speaking to man in the poetic scene he describes. It seems he has regarded Keats’s attitude towards audience as a Movement poet.

5.      Larkin has fundamental honesty to experience. He, therefore, invites the reader to share his experience.

6.      The Movement poetry and its audience have sensitivity to loss, regret, wistfulness and immediate past. Larkin’s poem “At Grass” presents the feeling of loss and regret. The horses as depicted in the poem represent the loss of power in the incessant flow of time.

7.      Like Movement poets Larkin does not worship nature in the tradition of the Romantics.

“A thrush sings,

Laurel-surrounded.

In the deep bare garden,

Its fresh-peeled voice

Astonishing the brickwork.”

(“Coming”)

Though Larkin shared some thematic concerns and craft techniques with the other Movement writers, he distinctively established himself as a poet of high esteem in the galaxy of the movement poets, heralding the new era in ye post-War period of British poetry by virtue of his own poetic ideology. He observes all social events around him and presents their vivid picture to the reader, enabling him to participate in the scenes. He portrays the churches that fell “out of use” in the British society. The changes that the movement of time brought about in physical structure of churches and the reverence for religious activities are quite obvious to the reader’s eyes in the poetic scene:

“Once I am sure there’s nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats and stone,

And little books; sprawling of flowers, cut…

Up at the holy end; the smell neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless I take off

                                                     My cycle-clips in awkward reverence”                (“Church Going”)

Larkin’s well known poem “Sunny Prestatyn” presents a poster to advertise the fight against cancer:

“She was too good for this life.

Very soon, a great transverse tear

Left only a hand and some blue

Now fight cancer is there.”

This is the way in which he portrays the life of a pretty girl in the poster on the sands and his observations and experiences.

Thus it is evident that Larkin certainly had the impact of the Movement poetry in transforming his poetic sensibility and The Less Deceived including the forthcoming volume reflects the fact that there are the characteristics of the Movement. Terry Whalen presents a clear picture of his transformation; “Larkin was undeniably shifted to amore unillusioned perspective since The North Ship and his affinities with Thomas Hardy and with the Movement writers have had effect on his vision and craft… Larkin’s affinities with the Movement writers and with an almost endless series of living poets who share with him related craft and thematic concern”. Peschmann also points out his evident link with the Movement: “What particularly links Larkin with the Movement is The Less Deceived in its fundamental honesty to experience: a clear eyed, unillusioned view of contemporary living and its problems, and a refusal to sentimentalize them, the whole couched, for the most part, in a language instantly recognizable as the colloquial idiom of our day, free from pedantry, grandiloquence, or the recherché phrase.”   

But Larkin’s Critics are unanimous as to the degree to which he shows his allegiance as to the Movement. Actually, Larkin was little annoyed by the academic sterility of much of Movement poetry, and never actively promoted himself as one of the group. After reading Conquest's draft introduction to New Lines, Larkin privately reveals to him what should be his aesthetic theory: "I feel we have got the method right – plain language, absence of posturings, sense of proportion, humour, abandonment of the dithyrambic ideal – and are waiting for the matter: a fuller and more sensitive response to life as it appears from day to day." It is true that almost all the poems of The Less Deceived and many of The Whitsun Weddings do bear testimony of Larkin’s adherence to some of the Movement tenets like building a poem around a rational structure, the use of colloquial, frequently defensive asides, hesitations and qualifications, a resorting to a pose of embarrassed awkwardness, intellectual wit, an impatience with neo-Romantic excess and a fidelity to formal framework. It is also true that some of the themes which he takes up- themes like loss and regret, retirement, the past, and the countryside-are typical of the Movement which historically came to terms with the tremendous socio-economic, political and cultural changes that overtook England after the Second World War. But many of the thematic and stylistic features of Larkin – his beliefs in determinism, his desire for a transcendence of the bounds of the material world, his juxtaposition of an empiricist diction and a mystical metaphysical mode, etc.- are absolutely his own. What is indeed important to note is that after The Whitsun Weddings Larkin’s poetry begins to move away from the Movement’s literary ideology and High Windows  poems show the completion of his departure from the Movement. In addition, the fact may be noted that Larkin’s worship of Nature and elemental presences in a number of celebratory lyrics ( for example “Coming”, “Spring”, “Water”, ”First Sight” in The Whitsun Weddings; “Sad Steps”, “The Trees”, “Cut Grass” in High Windows) clearly reveals his non – conformity with the principal poetic practices of the Movement. Also Larkin’s obsessive preoccupation with old age and death, so evident in all his volumes beginnings with The North Ship (though most conspicuously in High Windows), bears out the fact of his deviation from the main Movement line.

We can conclude our discussion with the reference of Blake Morrison who after discussing Larkin and his confederates, in terms of their adherence to and departure from the movement tenets remarks that “Larkin is by far and away the group’s finest poet”. A. Alvarez subscribes to Morrison’s view, and observes that Larkin’s poetry embodies “everything that was best in the Movement and at the same time shows what was finally lacking”. It may be argued that Larkin both belongs does not belong to the Movement. In fact, Larkin’s poetry – its thematic significance and its scope of signification – is too great and too profound to be narrowed down and fitted within the bounds of any decade – specific literary movement.