1955 in Poetry - Events

Events

• The Group, a British poetry movement, starts meeting in London with gatherings taking place once a week, on Friday evenings, at first at Philip Hobsbaum's flat and later at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith. The poets gathered to discuss each other's work, putting into practice the sort of analysis and objective comment in keeping with the principles of Hobsbaum's Cambridge tutor F. R. Leavis and of the New Criticism in general. Before each meeting about six or seven poems by one poet would be typed, duplicated and distributed to the dozen or so participants.
• The Movement poets as a group in Britain came to public notice this year in Robert Conquest's anthology New Lines. The core of the group consists of Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, D. J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie. They are identified with a hostility to modernism and internationalism, and look to Thomas Hardy as a model. However, both Davie and Gunn later move away from this position.
• Henry Rago becomes editor of Poetry
• April – Wallace Stevens is baptized a Catholic by the chaplain of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens spent his last days suffering from terminal cancer. After a brief release from the hospital, Stevens is readmitted and dies on August 2 at the age of 76.
• July 30 – Philip Larkin makes a train journey from Hull to Grantham which inspires his poem The Whitsun Weddings.