The last flickerings of New Apocalypse poetry—the flamboyant, surreal, and rhetorical style favored by Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne, and Vernon Watkins—died away soon after World War II. In its place emerged what came to be known with characteristic understatement as The Movement. Poets such as D.J. Enright, Donald Davie, John Wain, Roy Fuller, Robert Conquest, and Elizabeth Jennings produced urbane, formally disciplined verse in an antiromantic vein characterized by irony, understatement, and a sardonic refusal to strike attitudes or make grand claims for the poet’s role. The preeminent practitioner of this style was Philip Larkin, who had earlier ...(100 of 55503 words)