New Apocalyptics
The
New Apocalyptics were a poetry grouping in the UK in the 1940s, taking their name from the
anthology The New Apocalypse (1939), which was edited by
J. F. Hendry (1912-1986) and
Henry Treece. There followed the further anthologies
The White Horseman (1941) and
Crown and Sickle (1944).
Others closely associated were the Scottish (as Hendry was) poets
G. S. Fraser and
Norman MacCaig. There was quite an overlap, in fact with the
Scottish Renaissance group of writers, though not necessarily by publication in London.
Others sometimes mentioned in this connection include
Ruthven Todd,
Tom Scott,
Hamish Henderson,
Edwin Morgan,
Burns Singer, and
William Montgomerie. This grouping was fairly represented in
Modern Scottish Poetry (1946). Welsh and Irish poets were also prominent.
The other poets in the three anthologies were
Ian Bancroft,
Alex Comfort,
Dorian Cooke,
John Gallen,
Wrey Gardiner,
Robert Greacen,
Robert Herring,
Sean Jennett,
Maurice Lindsay,
Nicholas Moore,
Philip O'Connor,
Leslie Phillips,
Tom Scott,
Gervase Stewart,
Dylan Thomas,
Vernon Watkins, and
Peter Wells.
A broader movement of
New Romantics has been postulated, to cover many of the British poets between the 'Auden group' of the 1930s and
The Movement. This is much more debatable; it may be something of a flag of convenience for those such as the followers of
Dylan Thomas and
George Barker whose style clearly marked them off, or on the other hand a tag for those addressed polemically and retrospectively by the
Robert Conquest introduction to the
New Lines anthology. The phrase
New Romantics was used at the time, though, for example by
Henry Treece; it is usually attributed to
Cyril Connolly.
Wartime conditions had posed great editorial difficulties, and the London operations of the publishers such as
Tambimuttu,
Grey Walls Press and
Fortune Press had been stopgaps (and mostly disconnected from the
Cairo poets).
Kenneth Rexroth produced a post-war anthology covering the period, but it had little circulation in the UK. Another view was that from
John Lehmann's
New Writing.
By 1953
John Heath-Stubbs could write of the New Romantics as a movement of the past, though acutely singling out
W. S. Graham under the heading of in it, though not of it. This was in the introduction to an anthology
Images of Tomorrow, which also points out that the debate over the 'romanticism' was also a fissure within the Christian poets over style — indeed harking back to the religious and psychological depths of '
apocalypse'.
Poets of the Apocalypse (1983) by Arthur Edward Salmon; Boston Twayne Publishers,1983.
*
Andrew Duncan's notes on 1940s British poets
