He makes a good case. If the Movement was to Romanticism and Modernism as garlic is to vampires, he points out, how come the poem of his that inspired Anthony Thwaite to get in touch was called ‘The Death of Hart Crane’ (one of the few poets who manages to be Modernist and Romantic at the same time) and contained the line ‘vestigial to the dying endless sea’? ‘That alone,’ he says now, ‘ought to be enough to derail the old preconceptions.’
A bit later on he quotes a poem he wrote for ‘the notably non-movementy verse magazine’ Stand.
When verse seemed in need of improvement
We sat down and started a movement
We foregathered in Hull
Working hard to be dull
For we sure knew what being in the groove
meant.
He omitted it, he tells us without comment, from his New and Collected poems.
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