The Movement (literature)

The Movement was a term coined in 1954 by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, to describe a group of writers including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn and Robert Conquest.

[citation needed] The Movement's importance includes its worldview, which took into account the collapse of the British Empire and the United Kingdom's drastically reduced power and influence over world geo-politics.

Their poems were nostalgic for an older England and filled with rural images of the decaying way of life in the villages as the English people moved away from the countryside and into urban ghettoization.

It included many of the authors from the original anthology, as well as younger English poets like Thomas Blackburn, Edwin Brock, Hilary Corke, John Fuller, Ted Hughes, Edward Lucie-Smith, Anthony Thwaite and Hugo Williams.

The Movement was succeeded in the 1960s by “The Group”, whose members included Philip Hobsbaum, Alan Brownjohn, Adrian Mitchell, Peter Porter, Edward Lucie-Smith, George MacBeth, Ian Hamilton's Review school and Michael Horovitz's "Children of Albion".