The Movement was a term coined in 1954 by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, to describe a group of writers including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn and Robert Conquest. The Movement was quintessentially English in character; poets from other parts of the United Kingdom were not involved.
Description
Although considered a literary group, members of the Movement saw themselves more as an actual literary movement, with each writer sharing a common purpose. To these poets, good poetry meant simple, sensuous content and traditional, conventional and dignified form.
The Movement's importance includes its worldview, which took into account the collapse of the British Empire and the United Kingdom's drastically reduced power and influence over world geo-politics. The group's objective was to prove the importance of traditional English poetry, over the American-led innovations of modernist poetry. The members of the Movement were not anti-modernity but they were opposed to modernist literature, which was reflected in the Englishness of their poetry.
In 1963, a sequel to the original New Lines anthology, titled New Lines 2, was published. It included many of the authors from the original anthology, as well as younger English poets like Thomas Blackburn, Edwin Brock, Hilary Corke, John Fuller, Ted Hughes, Edward Lucie-Smith, Anthony Thwaite and Hugo Williams.
Decline
The "Angry Young Men" movement occurred in 1956 during the turning point of the Movement. David Lodge attributed the Movement's decline to the publication of the New Lines anthology.