Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

The Mersey Beat poets wrote poems in protest against the established social order, and the threat of nuclear war. Their work was a self-conscious attempt at creating an English equivalent to the Beats. The representatives are Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, Roger McGough.
Later 20th-century poets are Ronald Stuart Thomas, Charles Tomlinson and Carol Ann Duffy – the current poet laureate.
In the place of New Apocalypse poetry emerged The Movement with poets who 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. This group includes Dennis Joseph Enright, Donald Davie, Roy Fuller, Robert Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings.
The preeminent practitioner of this style was Philip Larkin, who had earlier displayed some of its qualities in two novels: ‘Jill’ and ‘A Girl in Winter.’ In Larkin’s poetry a melancholy sense of life’s limitations throbs through lines of elegiac elegance. Suffused with acute awareness of mortality and transience, Larkin’s poetry is also finely responsive to natural beauty, vistas of which open up even in poems darkened by fear of death or somber preoccupation with human solitude.
John Betjeman (poet laureate from 1972 to 1984) shared Larkin’s intense consciousness of mortality and gracefully versified nostalgia.
Ted Hughes’s poetry is in contrast to sad traditionalism of Larkin and Betjeman. In extraordinary vigorous verse, beginning with his first collection, ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, Hughes captures ferocity, vitality and splendour of the natural world.
Irish poets of the mid 1900s also drew material from uniquely Irish sources. Patrick Kavanagh created lyrical poetry in a simple, straightforward style. His most famous poem ‘The Great Hunger’/1942/ deals with the plight of poor Irish farmers. Austin Clarke wrote poetry that satirizes social and religious hypocrisy in Ireland in such collections as ‘Ancient Lights.’/1955/. From the late 1960s Seamus Heaney stood out. He began with combining a tangible, tough, sensuous response to rural and agricultural life, reminiscent of that of Ted Hughes, with meditation about the relationship between the taciturn world of his parents and his own communicative calling as a poet. Since then Heaney became the greatest poet Ireland has produced, eventually winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Surveying carnage of the 1970s and 80s, vengeance, bigotry, and gentler disjunctions such as that between the unschooled and cultivated, Heaney made himself the master of a poetry of reconciliations.

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