Clarification: I mean that the sense of the 1940s as a disaster continues to be expressed (not that the 1940s somehow triumphed over the Movement). Apologies for clumsy writing.
> On Jul 29, 2016, at 11:33 AM, Jeremy Green <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> Jamie,
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Best,
> Jeremy
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>> 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
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