Bedtime Story (Historical Context)

Historical Context

In the 1950s Britain witnessed a renewed interest in poetry, particularly in people who desired to move poetry foreword, or at least away from what some poets feared it was becoming. One phenomenon which received much attention then and which has gained a place in the literary history of England is a group of writers called The Movement. Consisting of Philip Larkin, Kinglsey Amis, John Wain, Thom Gunn, D. J. Enright, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Robert Conquest, and a few others, The Movement stood for writing about real people and real events and in returning British poetry to a stricter versification, away from what they perceived as the growing sloppiness of free verse and other organic forms. In addition to opposing much of what was happening in American poetry, they opposed melodrama and hysteria, which they thought much of the poetry of World War II embodied, and (largely) thought of themselves as anti-romantic. Critics sometimes labeled them as conservative in their seeming resistance to experimentation and their desire to “forget” the war. The Movement’s work is showcased in Conquest’s anthologies, New Lines, and New Lines 2, published in 1956 and 1963 respectively. Some of the poets mentioned, however, claim that no such group existed, that it is largely a manufactured label for the convenience of literary critics, who need to lump and categorize to make sense of so many diverse approaches to poetry. In an interview with Jhan Hochman for The Portland Review, Thom Gunn, for example, notes “That kind of thing [artistic groupings] is really a wonderful example of the b — s — of literary categories. It strikes me as a more meaningless category than most, ‘The Movement.’” Eight people were supposed to have been in The Movement, but everybody was writing like that. It wasn’t just those eight people.”

Yet another group of writers, curiously enough called The Group, which included Ted Hughes, Peter Redgrove, and MacBeth, arose in opposition to The Movement. It stood for poetic change and for experimenting with different forms and ways to present poetry, and was to a degree driven by critics as much as poets. The Group had more of an underground flavor to it, as almost anyone could secure an invitation to one of its gatherings. However, meetings took on the often stodgy tenor of workshops, during which poems were often discussed in light of practical criticism. Though MacBeth distanced himself from labels as much as possible, he often attended meetings of The Group, in large part because of its desire to renew poetry’s function as an oratorical as much as a written art. MacBeth himself was an enthusiastic performer of his poetry and in general supportive of developing poetry as a performing art. MacBeth disliked The Movement, in part because of the seriousness with which its members approached poetry. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography Lawrence R. Ries quotes MacBeth as saying that “The Movement weren’t prepared to churn out a bad poem about the most important experience of their lives. A willingness to do that seems to me the first essential of an important poet.” MacBeth’s own relentless stylistic playfulness and his willingness to write (and publish) many very bad poems underscore both his interest in poetry more as process than product.

Compare & Contrast

• 1962: Scotland-born Sean Connery appears in the first James Bond film, Dr. No.

  1995: Scotland’s film and tourist industries receive a boost when Braveheart, Mel Gibson’s film about William Wallace, wins five Oscars and makes the world aware, again, of Scotland’s history.

  Today: Ireland-born Pierce Brosnan now plays James Bond.

• 1950: Scottish Nationalists steal the “Stone of Destiny” from Westminster Abbey. This was Scotland’s Coronation Stone, taken by the English in 1296. By tradition all British Monarchs have to be crowned while sitting on it. It was eventually recovered from Arbroath Abbey.

  1996: The Stone of Destiny is finally returned to Scotland permanently, 700 years after it was stolen by Edward I.

  1997: Scottish people voted yes for “Devolution” for Scotland, by a 75 percent majority. This would give Scotland it’s own parliament, not tied to English parliamentary systems, for the first time in several centuries.

• 1958: The most prominent political party of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Movement National Congolais (MNC), was founded in 1958 by Patrice Lumumba, a third-class clerk in the district revenue office of the postal service. Before that, another Congolese political party existed but only brought people together along ethnic lines.

  1960-65: Political turmoil engulfs the Democratic Republic of Congo. Lumumba is assassinated by forces loyal to Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko, who eventually takes over the government in 1965.

  1971: Seko renames the country the Republic of Zaire and asks Zairean citizens to change their names to African names.

  1997: Seko is overthrown by Laurent Kabila and Rwandan-backed rebels, who literally “re-name” the country the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• 205 million B.C. : At this time, many species of amphibians and reptiles became extinct. The extinction set the stage for the rise of the dinosaurs, which for a time became the world’s dominant animals.

  65 million B.C.: The last living dinosaur species vanished from the Earth. Many other terrestrial species and many marine species also became extinct during this time. The extinctions led to the rise of mammals and marked the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, in which we live today.

  Today: Ecologists estimate that we have lost hundreds of thousands of species in the past 50 years. The experts predict that if present trends continue, we are likely to lose one-half of all living species within the next century.