A poetry marked by understatement, classical

restraint and a refusal to go beyond everyday

reality.The Movement poets were considered anti-
romantic, but we find many romantic elements in
Larkin and Hughes. It was the revival of the
importance of form; good poetry means simple,
sensuous content, traditional, conventional and
dignified form. The goal of The Movement was to
write poetry that was anti-romantic and structured,
avoiding poetry that was experimental in format
and text. It was The Movement that sparked the
division among different types of British poetry.
Their poems were nostalgic for the former Britain
and filled with pastoral images of the decaying way
of life as Britain moved farther from the rural and
more towards the urban.

The Irish Civil War: (192223)
Romanticism originated in the second half of the
18th century at the same time as the French
Revolution

KEATS (1795-1821)
Keats is probably the only romantic poet apart
from Blake whose rank is conspicuously higher that
it was in the 19
th
century. Douglas Bush
..Comparable to Shakespeares sonnets
"I have left no immortal work behind me nothing
to make my friends proud of my memory but I
have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and
if I had had time I would have made myself
remembered."
..nothing startles me beyond the moment. The
setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a
sparrow come before my Window I take part in its
existence and pick about the gravel.
Negative Capability is term to discuss the state in
which we are capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact & reason.... ...[being] content with half
knowledge" where one trusts in the heart's
perceptions.
His Odes have an underlying unity. They portray a
common attitude towards life and revolve around a
single central mood. They are different phases of a
single experience.

ODE TO AUTUMN (1819)
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close
bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are
they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

ODE ON GRECIAN URN (1819)
Elgin Marbles (Parthenon sculptures)

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe/Than
ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all/Ye know
on earth, and all ye need to know
a serious blemish on a beautiful poem; and the
reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or
that it is a statement which is untrue Eliot

ODE TO NIGHTINGALE (1819)
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:Do I wake or sleep?

PHILIP LARKIN (1922-85)
Non sentimental, withdrawn, matter of fact tone is
hallmark of his poetry. Human life, its predicament,
the disappointment, disillusionment are recurring
themes. Agnostic approach played a pivotal role in
shaping his personality and poetry simultaneously.
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for
Wordsworth.
I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly
vanishing, all that usual things

CHURCH GOING (1954)
The Less Deceived (TLD)
Once I am sure there's nothing going on/I step
inside, letting the door thud shut.
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,/Reflect
the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was;
A serious house on serious earth it is
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,

BLEANEY (1955 TWW)
Circumstantial
So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don't know.
AMBULENCE (1961 TWW)
Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.

MCMXIV (1964)
The Whitsun Weddings (TWW)
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

TED HUGHES (1930-1998)
British Poet Laureate from 1984
He wanted to capture not just live animals, but the
aliveness of animals in their natural state: their
wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox and
the crow-ness of the crow. Thomas Nye
earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in
particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an
interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of
the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural
world. Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on
life: animals live out a struggle for the survival of the
fittest in the same way that humans strive for
ascendancy and success. Examples can be seen in
the poems "Hawk Roosting" and "Jaguar"

THAT MORNING
(Eliadean illud tempus moment)
(Rf: Southern Alaska in Summer 1980)
..There the body
Separated, golden and imperishable,
From its doubting thought a spirit-beacon
Lit by the power of the salmon
That came on, came on, and kept on coming
Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing
One wrong thought might darken. As if the fallen
World and salmon were over. As if these
Were the imperishable fish
That had let the world pass away
So we found the end of our journey.
So we stood, alive in the river of light,
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

THOUGHT FOX (The Hawk in the rain 1957)
I imagine this midnight moments forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clocks loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Full Moon and Little Frieda (wodwo)
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the
clank of a bucket
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.
..The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing
amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

CHAUCER (1343-1400)
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The
droghte of March hath perced to the roote . . .
To hold the reins of the straining attention
Of your imagined audienceyou declaimed Chaucer
To a field of cows.
What would happen
If you were to stop? Would they attack you,
Scared by the shock of silence, or wanting more?
So you had to go on. You went on
And twenty cows stayed with you hypnotized.
I imagine I shooed them away. But
Your sostenuto rendering of Chaucer
Was already perpetual. What followed
Found my attention too full
And had to go back into oblivion.

SEAMUS HEANEY (1939-2013)
TOLLUND MAN (found in 1950)
(Rf: The bog people by P.V. Glob)
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle
Bridegroom to the goddess
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home

CASTING AND GATHERING
(Dedicate to Ted Hughes)
Words themselves are doors.
I am still standing there, awake and dreamy
I have grown older and can see them both
Years and years ago, these sounds took sides
(start)
I love hushed air. I trust contrariness.
Years and years go past and I cannot move
For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers
And then vice versa, without changing sides.

THE CONSTABLE CALLS
I assumed
Small guilts and sat
Imagining the black hole in the barracks
His cap was upside down
On the floor, next his chair
Arithmetic and fear.
Closed the domesday book
His boot pushed off
And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

PERSONAL HELICON
(For Michael Longley)
..is essentially a simple tribute to the lost child in
all adults Lindsey H.
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

TOOME ROAD
Nations are born in the hearts of the poets and
prosper and die in the hands of politicians. (A.I)
How long were they approaching down my roads
As if they owned them? The whole country was
sleeping.
Whom should I run to tell
Among all of those with their back doors on the
latch
For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours
visitant
Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?

DIGGING
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests/I'll dig with it.