Postwar British and Irish poetry

1950s

The Movement was a loose group of 1950s poets who reacted against the new Romantic poetry of Dylan Thomas and elitist poetry of T.S. Eliot and his followers. These authors believed that the poet should be an ordinary person, not a bard visionary. Except for Philip Larkin, other representatives of this group were the Angry Young Men Kingley Amis and John Wain who also wrote poetry.

They used streetwise language so that could be understood by an average inhabitant of urban area and addressed readers directly as equals by "of course, you know" conversational formulas. Their poetry was sober, civil and often ironic. The most common poetic devise they used was debunking = the use of low ordinary language and style when talking about serious issues to bring the topic down to earth.

PHILIP LARKIN was the dominant figure of The Movement, known for his use of colloquial language. His most famous poem Church Going presents a man who comes on the bicycle to the church and loses words in the presence of the church building that seems totally out of place in the urban area. Larkin traced the importance of the churches in the modern world from the point of view of an ordinary city person. He civilly ponders on the role of religion in the present that shrunk on the fear of death and reveals that he is an agnostic.

High Windows shows his admiration for Lawrence's Lady Chatterley’s Lover where offensive colloquial language stresses its setting in the present. North Ship is his first collection of poems with strong enchantment with Yeats, The Less Deceived with Thomas Hardy. The Whitsun Wedding is the title of the whole collection and a poem which masterly depicted  England seen from a train.

ELIZABETH JENNINGS was inspired by religion after spending three months in Rome with the money she got from her successful collection A Way of Looking. Her mental illness contributes to the themes in her poetry.

The poem One Flesh is about a married pair who are lying in the bed, not touching, close and yet so far. "Strangely apart, yet strangely close together." They are old now, the narrator is their child. "Do they know they're old, those two who are my father and my mother whose fire from which I came has now grown cold?"

The Group was a literary workshop of poets founded by PHILIP HOBSBAUM who discussed each other's work in order to improve. It is often seen as a successor to The Movement and they did share some aspects with them but they were much more critical of the society and there is cruelty and violence in their poetry. Ted Hughes occasionally attended.

TED HUGHES was one of the most controversial poets, married to an American poet Sylvia Plath. Birthday Letters is a sequence of poems that explored their relationship until her suicide. He used metaphors with animals that appear frequently in his poetry but he focuses on dark and cruel aspects of natural life, animal instincts and struggle for survival = he is the voice of spontaneous instincts and sexual sensations similar to D. H. Lawrence. The most famous collection is Crow and The Hawk in the Rain.

His poetry is not really about animals but rather about engagement with them. He tries to look at animals as Palaeolithic hunters did, expressing a primitive experience. In the poem The Jaguar, the poet stands in a zoo, entranced by a sight of a jaguar, his powers of understanding pushed beyond their limit, imagining how it feels to inhabit a jaguar's body. He experiences to be inside an individual jaguar, not a jaguar representing its entire species.

1960s

Liverpool poets was a group of poets whose poetry was composed for the purpose of public performances and it is much more enjoyable to watch it performed than to read it quietly because it is full of playfulness and language games. Their legendary anthology is The Mersey Sound.

Regional poetry was associated with the industrial cities of north Britain, regional social political conspicuousness and the use of local dialects.

TONY HARRISON’s material of much of his poetry is provided by the memories of his working-class childhood in Newcastle. He is noted for his controversial poem V describing a trip to see his parents' grave in a Leeds cemetery, the title has several possible interpretations as victory, versus, verse etc.  

Collections Black Daisies for the Bride, The School of Eloquence is a sequence of sonnets. The poem Work dramatises an account given by a teenage girl to the Children's Employment Commission, describing the harshness and inhumanity of her life as a worker during the industrial revolution. He directed a film Prometheus based on his poem of the same name, which links the myth of Prometheus chained to a rock to have his liver eaten by the vulture as a punishment for the theft of fire with the enchainment of workers in the Promethean industries, the coal mines.

The poem Marked with D. is about the cremation of narrator's father who had a different religious belief. The speaker compares the remaining ashes of his father's body the "ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf" and shows the finality of death, the speaker does not belief in Heaven ("sorry for his sake there's no Heaven to reach.") He tears down not only Christianity but also his father.

1970s-present

CRAIG RAINE discovered wonder in the ordinary. In The Onion, Memory he establishes his concentration on re-examining familiar objects and surroundings and provides a complex portrait of the contemporary world. A Martian Sends a Postcard Home illustrates things seen on Earth from the Martian perspective ("time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience").

Bringing this unusual attitude into poetry resulted in the minor movement Martian poetry (late 1970s - early 1980s), aiming to break the familiar by describing things in unfamiliar ways, as though through the eyes of a Martian.

WENDY COPE is a classic English humorist. Nobody can match her when writing about men and love, she captures perfectly the disappointment in relationships but despite heart-breakdowns in romance, her witty poems celebrate love. Perhaps her most characteristic early poems were the Strugnell Sonnets from her first book Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis with Strugnell being a hopeless suburban would-be poet, of the kind she later called a 'tump' (Totally Useless Male Poet). Serious Concerns’s title highlights the fact that some of her work has always been meditative and serious rather than funny.

In her poem Bloody Men the female narrator complains that a woman wait for a right man for a long time and then he finally comes, more men appear as well suddenly and the woman is forced to choose without much time to decide. However, when she makes a mistake in the decision, "there is no turning back" and if she jumps off the relationship, nobody else will notice her and she will stay alone while other men go by.

Irish poetry

THE BELFAST GROUP (1963-1972) or just THE GROUP was established in 1963 by PHILIP HOBSBAUM who led a similar group in London. It was a workshop for young poets connected to Queen’s University in Belfast whose work became essential for the literature of Northern Ireland. Hobsbaum invited poets-to-be into his house to read aloud their poems and then to evaluate them, introducing close reading. It was often humiliating for the poets but useful as, for instance, Heaney, Muldoon and Carson became very good poets thanks to the workshop. In 1966 Heaney became the chairman and meetings moved to his house. In 1970s meetings were held in pubs.

PAUL MULDOON (1951) was also educated at Queen’s University in Belfast. He was a producer for BBC but hemoved to US and has been living there since. He was not appreciated as much as Heaney because his poems are very difficult to understand but he was awarded Pulitzer Prize.

Madoc: A Mystery is among Muldoon's most difficult works, it is a book-length poem, which some consider Muldoon's masterpiece. It narrates in fractured sections an alternate history in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to America in order to found a utopian community.

New Weather included poems inspired by the Group. Quoof was controversial for sexual themes but it is not that shocking nowadays. Meeting the British. The poem Gathering Mushrooms was maybe written when Muldoon himself was under the influence of hypnotic mushrooms. It is about a man who is kneeling "by the grave of his mother and father" but he does not feel any grief. In fact, he does not feel any emotion at all, everything is the same for him and the line "you could barely tell one from the other" is being repeated several times.

CIARAN CARSON (1948) /kíren/ was also educated at Queen’s University in Belfast where he established and led Seamus Heaney’s Centre for Poetry. He was a poet, a novelist and a translator, his most famous is the translation of Alighieri’s The Inferno (2002). Collections The Irish for No and  Belfast Confetti.

Night Out depicts going to pubs that are not opened for everybody, just the Irish. They are drinking, listening to music but at the same time as they are having fun, someone else is being shot so they also listen to the gunfire. They are not scared, they are used to it - it was a terrible everyday routine.

SEAMUS HEANEY (1939-2013) was born in the same year when Yeats died as the eldest of 9 children to the Catholic farmer family. He had the same roots as Kavanagh and was influenced by him but he was lucky to gain scholarship and to study at Queen’s University in Belfast where he stayed till the end of the Group in 1972.

His first collection Death of Naturalist was published in 1966 when he became the group’s chairman. His most famous poem Digging is about moving from farmer’s to the poet’s life. He admitted that hard work in the fields is not suited for him as he only digs with pen. However, he has deepest admiration for the work of his father and grandfather and even though he will not continue in the family tradition, he will transform it into digging with pen. The title of the collection refers to the death of his life as a farmer after he became a writer.

He was extremely productive and was actually able to publish his work during his life without problems. Door into the Dark (1969) is a collection where the door serves as a symbol of moving into the unknown. Wintering Out (1972) is about nature, he returns to his roots. North (1975) is interested in archaeology and history of Northern Ireland, inspired by the discovery of frozen mummies in Scandinavia.

In 1995 he was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature. He also studied Latin and Anglo-Saxon, in 1999 translated into modern English Beowulf and also translated Irish myths in the work Sweeney Astray. In 2003 at the Queen’s University, Seamus Heaney’s Centre for Poetry was established with Carson as its chairman. He died in 2013 from a heart stroke.

For the Commander of the Eliza features "routine patrol sighting a rowboat." In the boat, the officer sees "piled in the bottom of their craft six grown men" who are starving. The marines have enough food because higher-ups "always kept us right with flour and beef" but commanders did not give them "mandate to relieve distress" so the officer decides not to help. He tries to justify it by picturing them as "violent and without hope" because they would die sooner or later anyway. In addition, these weak people cannot work so they should just die: "who could not swim might go ahead and sink."

Act of Union depicts Ireland symbolically as "she" and England as "imperially male" who rapes poor female Ireland. Their relationship is only parasitical, Ireland is nothing more than a colony, there is no real treaty in the rightful sense of the word.

Requiem for the Croppies describes the 1789 uprising. Rebels were always on the move and as there were "no kitchens on the run" so they put barley in their pockets. Rebels tried to come up with new tactics like "stampede cattle into infantry" but in the end their only weapons were only primitive pikes. They are killed by the British Army and "buried without coffin" on a hillside but there is hope in the form of a new life as that barley from their pockets "grew up out of the grave." Their rotting bodies provided fertilizer and also gave hope for future rebellions.

Casualty is about Heaney's fisherman friend O'Neill who is a heavy drinker and every night goes to the pub. He does not understand Heaney's profession of a poet but Heaney manages to speak with him about his topics and admires him: "loves his whole manner." However, O'Neil is "blown to bits" in the bombing after he breaks a curfew imposed by IRA as a revenge after Bloody Sunday. He went to the pub anyway, ignoring the curfew as "he would not be held at home by his own crowd whatever threats." Heaney is devastated by his death since he "tasted freedom with him."

Traditions criticises that Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition destroyed the Irish one as "our muse was bulled by the alliterative tradition...forgotten...while that most sovereign mistress (meaning the British Queen) beds us down." They are supposed to be proud of "our Elizabethan English" but that is not Irish tradition.

Mid-Term Break is a poem in which Heaney is trying to cope with the sudden death of his kid brother who died in a road accident. It happened when he way away at the boarding school and upon his return, his father is crying whereas his mother is only angry as she cannot cry anymore. When he sees the corpse, he look as if he is sleeping, just "bruise on his left temple." The narrator then compared the length of a thing to the length of time: "a four foot box, a foot for every year."