John, thanks for this very informative Sicilian missive. I have a few, probably predictable, disagreements - Heaney, Mahon and Longley don't always, in my view, suffer from the comparison with Thomas, (and that relates also to your description of their differing modes of composition which surely can always include working from and towards words). I don't actually think that the comparison needs to be there, as they can happily co-exist. 
    Whatever the failings of the Morrison/Motion anthology, with nearly all of its high points being from Northern Ireland, I think the description of Little Englandism is reductive and inaccurate. 
  Both of these are secondary points, and anyway I've bored even myself silly arguing about such things on this list.
   It was helpful to have more of the history of Larkin vis-a-vis Thomas. But as for the rest of the Movement, you seem to have missed the irony of my remarks about a revival. I thought I'd made clear in the preceding post my distaste for Conquest and Amis.
Buone vacanze,
Jamie
   

Sent from my iPad

> On 30 Jul 2016, at 17:22, GOODBY JOHN <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Some responses to recent posts - I'm on holiday, though, so I can't do justice
> to them, or even mention some, for which apologies. 
> 
> Larkin not only invited Thomas to Oxford in 1941, but praised his reading
> unreservedly to Amis. He also registered, if rather in passing, sorrow at his
> death in 1953. But he had fallen in with Amis' personalised abuse of Thomas by
> the mid 1950s. Perhaps what's not sufficiently understood is the extent to which
> the Movement had to define itself against Thomas because they were initially
> (adolescently) so bound up with him and the 1940s Apocalypse style. Amis' own
> first published collection, let's remember, was titled 18 Poems, the same as
> Thomas' first volume, and is full of Thomasesque poems. Hence, of course, the
> virulence of Amis's later reaction, which is also a self-purgation (e.g. his
> 'elegy' for Thomas: 'When we puke up we swill it down the sink ... You should
> have stuck to spewing beer, not ink.') Amis retained a lifelong and pathological
> obsession with Thomas, planting a negative version of him in two of his novels,
> including the last one, The Old Devils. That Larkin never entirely went along
> with Amis is evidenced by his generous (and genuinely intelligent) selection of
> Thomas in his Oxford anthology of, I think, 1971. (Jim Keery has done some
> excellent work on this aspect of the Movement poets' early Apocalyptic
> allegiances; see the excellent 'Burning baby' series of 9 articles published in
> PN Review 2002-06) But then, as Sean said, he also included loads of Bunting
> (though he had to be forced to include David Jones, Sean), and Rosemary Tonks. 
> 
> The Belfast situation is rather different: Heaney, Longley and Mahon all
> identified with Thomas as a provincial outsider who made it to the top in London
> on his own terms - the major pre-1944 Education Act example, in fact - but took
> on his devotion to form, and some of his verbal vigour, rather than his more
> fundamental attitudes to language and poetry. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy a good
> deal of early Heaney, Longley and Mahon, and say so in Irish poetry since 1950
> (2000, Manchester UP). If you want an example of Thomas's influence, try Mahon's
> elegy for Marilyn Monroe of 1962, which begins, in the best Thomas fashion: 'If
> it were said let there be no more light / Let loose the high winds and the
> long-tailed seas, / Then she would die in all our hearts tonight ...' Heaney's
> Death of a Naturalist reads like an extended riposte to 'Fern Hill' - this is
> how things *really* happen on farms, you townie! - but his later essay, Dylan
> the Durable, misreads him far more banally; Thomas's Chagall-like late pastoral
> just isn't 'realistic' enough. Doh! But none of the early Belfast Groupers could
> say, with Thomas - and it's the only statement on his poetry he repeated from
> first to last - that 'Poetry should work from words, not towards them'. Meaning
> that you start with some verbal cluster or bolus, twisted idioms, puns, etc.
> which has an innate energy, some deep affective charge, and a musical (or
> calculatedly *anti*-musical) cadence, and not with an idea, pre-planned
> narrative, empirical object or scenario which you then describe. You let that
> material interact (DT's account of 'my dialectical method' makes it sound like
> nuclear fission, with the strict form acting as the graphite rods to counter,
> just about, verbal meltdown), always allowing the verbal material to shape the
> development of the poem to a fairly radical degree. This is why so many Thomas
> poems turn on a pun, a twisted idiom - they try to work out their possibilities
> of the material, not impose a predetermined mise-en-scene. It's also why they're
> anti-anecdotal, and why so many are also actually about the writing process.
> 
> But the Movement was never Thomas' problem (and Jamie's argument that we should
> read them therefore is rather a red herring; life is too short for anyone to be
> wading through Robert Conquest, DJ Enright and Anthony Thwaite). Thomas survived
> them, easily enough, to surf the libertarian wave of the 1960s, which in some
> ways he seemed to have anticipated. You don't get onto the cover of Sergeant
> Pepper's or provide a nom de chansonnier for Robert Zimmerman if your work isn't
> somehow posthumously in tune with the Zeitgeist. It was the neo-Movement revival
> of the late 1970s onwards, a little-Englandism epitomised in the Motion /
> Morrison Penguin anthology, plus the kind of Oxbridge critics I mentioned in my
> last post that really did for his reputation. Together with the failure of the
> new, theory-inspired criticism, to see that Thomas' poetry was actually
> (pre-1941 at least) in the same general territory as Finnegans Wake, Henry
> Miller, Flann O'Brien, even early Zukofsky; try 'Now', 'I make this in a warring
> absence', 'How shall my animal' or the amazing prose poem 'In the direction of
> the beginning' for confirmation. Ignored in England, and displaced in the USA (
> where critics, rightly, started writing about their own amazing postwar poetry)
> he increasingly became the preserve of an older generation of Welsh critics in
> the 1980s. Eagleton's attempt to demolish 'A Refusal to Mourn' exemplifies the
> point; a 'radical' champion of the autonomy of the signifier hammers Thomas for
> being too 'rhetorical', and at the same time completely misses all the subtle
> 'realistic' traces the poem does have: 'stations' as Tube stations, the
> Churchillian 'Never', the discreet allusions to the Holocaust in 'Zion' and
> 'synagogue'.
> 
> Where I do agree with Jamie is on Thomas's US impact. Berryman was a very
> perceptive early reader of Thomas (they met and befriended each other as early
> as 1937 when Berryman was in England on Fullbright), and his breakthrough poem,
> Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, published in the year of Thomas's death (1953;
> Berryman was the last person to see Thomas alive), uses Thomas to break the
> stranglehold of Auden and Yeats. Roethke, ditto, as far as the greenhouse poems
> of the 1940s go; just check them against Thomas's early 'green' poems, such as
> 'The force', 'When all my five and country senses see'. And also put Lowell's 'A
> Quaker Graveyard' alongside Thomas's sea poems, such as 'Ballad of the
> Long-legged bait'. 
> 
> As for Duncan and others, it's more a question of the sheer pervasivenes of
> Thomas in the 1940s, when he seemed to American poets a model of resistance to
> clipped, upper middle-class British and Ivy League styles and attitudes (a
> Rexroth anthology of 1948 makes him the prime standard-bearer of this cause). In
> SUNY Buffalo I found a glowing review of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
> by Duncan, and I think there are echoes of Thomas in his essays on poetic
> measure (I love the Pindar poem too, Mark, but I think Thomas's music is far
> more subtle than he's usually given credit for). I'd even go so far as to claim
> parallels between Thomas's insistence on the 'breath' and 'blood' physiological
> roots of poetry and some of what Olson - another, more grudging, admirer -says
> in his 'Projectivist Verse' essay. And while we're at it, there's Thomas'
> surrealism, easily the most successful in English before the New York poets in
> the early 1950s. John Ashbery says somewhere that early Thomas was one of the
> five or six formative influences on early Frank O'Hara: put 'Second Avenue'
> beside 'I, in my intricate image' and you can see what he meant.
> 
> Thomas's reading style, at its most BBC-plummy,
> reach-the-back-of-the-lecture-theatre - that is, of the reading tours and
> broadcasts - generally sounds badly dated. There's a nice comment by Geoffrey
> Hill, who cites Thomas's reading at Oxford in the early 1950s as one of the best
> he'd heard, describing him as 'one of the last great actor-managers'. Shades of
> Charles Laughton, and Thomas (who of course knew all this) calling himself as
> 'an old ham'. And the trouble is that these don't do justice to many of the
> poems, extraordinary *performances* though they are; 'Fern Hill' is a
> quicksilver, fluid, highly enjambed poem that dies with this style of reading.
> But catch the better performances - there a marvellous, throaty rendering of 'In
> my craft or sullen art' and a fabulously grand guignol one of 'If I were tickled
> by the rub of love' - and the hairs will stand up on the back of your neck, and
> your eyes smart.
> 
> OK, there's half an hour left for a dip in the hotel pool, so I'm off. And since
> I've been up Etna today, and I recall that Thomas mentions it in 'A saint about
> to fall', in the associational way he specialises in can I recommend you all go
> read it? It has everything I've tried to say about his subtlety, bravura, and
> even politics (there's a kind of elegy for the Spanish Republic in there, I
> think), but put a zillion times better than I ever could, and you really won't
> regret it ...
> 
> John
> 
>> On 29 July 2016 at 20:48 Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Perhaps this will herald a Movement revival, and people will start actually 
>> reading them instead of just using them as a weapon against the mainstream, 
>> or it might be the beginning of a Prynne & Amis partnership revival of US 
>> interest in British poetry. Somehow neither seems over likely.
>> Jamie
>> 
>> -----Original Message----- 
>> From: Jeremy F Green
>> Sent: Friday, July 29, 2016 6:27 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: a bit ofresearch
>> 
>> Weirdly, NYRB Books just published Amis’s _Collected Poems_ complete w/ 
>> intro by Clive James.  A bit bewildering after other recent volumes in the 
>> series - e.g. J.H.Prynne _The White Stones_.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jul 29, 2016, at 12:25 PM, Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> 
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Jeremy,
>>>  The other 'fallacious assumption' I mentioned was that 'this grouping' 
>>> (i.e. the supposed mainstream) disapproves of Thomas. The first - to my 
>>> mind - fallacious assumption, and tedious to boot, is that the present 
>>> mainstream is continuous with the aesthetics of the Movement.
>>>  I said in my first post that the Movement's animosity towards Thomas was 
>>> well documented. I'm familiar with Conquest's little-englandish and prissy 
>>> New Lines introduction - who, by the way, reads Conquest these days, or 
>>> more than one or two humorous anthology pieces by Amis? - but I also noted 
>>> Larkin's affection for him.
>>>  You're right though that since the late sixties/early seventies (?) 
>>> Thomas has been more or less ignored by the academy, loved as he is 
>>> outside of it. I think there's an element of literary snobbery about this, 
>>> and alongside of that signs of readers repudiating their own youthful 
>>> enthusiasms...
>>> Jamie
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 29 Jul 2016, at 16:33, Jeremy F Green <[log in to unmask]> 
>>>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Jamie,
>>>> 
>>>> I don’t think this is quite right.  It’s not a fallacious assumption to 
>>>> say that the Movement poets disapproved of Thomas.  That disapproval is 
>>>> trenchantly expressed by Robert Conquest in the introduction to the first 
>>>> New Lines anthology; it’s also evident in Amis’s “Against Romanticism.” 
>>>> Donald Davie has stern words for Thomas in Articulate Energy.  There’s 
>>>> also a general sense that the 1940s was a disastrous decade in British 
>>>> poetry; it outlives the Movement.
>>>> 
>>>> Unspooling from all this down the years, it feels as if there’s a dearly 
>>>> loved Thomas—the poet of Fern Hill and the sonorous reader and the author 
>>>> of Under M Wood—and a sense that Thomas is in fact a bad poet (recently I 
>>>> read an Eagleton take down of “A Refusal to Mourn…”).  Arguably, the most 
>>>> interesting Thomas—about whom John Goodby writes (and definitely a big 
>>>> shout out here for Under the Spelling Wall)—gets lost in all of this.
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> Jeremy
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> The Movement's reaction against the perceived emotionalism of his work 
>>>>> has been documented, but the only reference I've found from admittedly 
>>>>> early Larkin is one expressing delight and admiration. The tedious 
>>>>> assumption, much repeated on this list, that the Movement's aesthetics 
>>>>> flow seamlessly into what's called the contemporary 'mainstream' 
>>>>> (including Northern Irish poetry) leads to another fallacious assumption 
>>>>> that this grouping disapproves of Thomas.
>>>>> Jamie
>>>>