Although considered a literary group, members of the Movement saw themselves more as an actual 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 Britain's reduced dominance in world politics. The group's objective was to prove the importance of English poetry over the new modernist poetry. The members of the Movement were not anti-modernists; they were opposed to modernism, which was reflected in the Englishness of their poetry. The Movement sparked the divisions among different types of British poetry. Their poems were nostalgic for the earlier Britain and filled with pastoral images of the decaying way of life as Britain moved farther from the rural and more towards the urban.
Representative collections
The Movement produced two anthologies, Poets of the 1950s and New Lines. Conquest, who edited the New Lines anthology, described the connection between the poets as "little more than a negative determination to avoid bad principles". These 'bad principles' are usually described as "excess", both in terms of theme and stylistic devices. Poets in New Lines included Enright, Conquest, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain. The polemical introduction to New Lines particularly targeted the 1940s poets, the generation of Dylan Thomas. 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 youngerEnglish 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. Afterward, The Group became less exclusive. Members were no longer required to fight and defend one another's work, for they had become accepted members of the literary world. The Group's members included Philip Hobsbaum, Alan Brownjohn, Adrian Mitchell, PeterPorter, Edward Lucie-Smith, George MacBeth, Ian Hamilton's Review school and Michael Horovitz's "Children of Albion". The Group was similar to the Movement; they shared similar ideas about the form and seriousness of modernist poetry.
