Encounter (magazine) - Centrality of English Poets

Centrality of English Poets

Encounter’s prodigal amplitude in the range of worldwide poets it published throughout was in part a function of the fact that almost all its literary co-editors included the poetic vocation among his roles, with the unfolding succession after Spender’s departure in 1967 (he had stepped back to serve as Corresponding Editor while in America 1966–67, with the distinguished academic literary critic Frank Kermode as his substitute) including the critics, novelists and poets Nigel Dennis (1967–70) and D.J. Enright (1970–72), and poet Anthony Thwaite (1973–85), ensuring the ongoing enlistment of rising talent in the metrical sphere. Of special mention here were the poets loosely affiliated from the early 1950s on in what was called The Movement (literature) – Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain, who together contributed long and often to the magazine, in many cases, as the names will suggest, in fiction and in essays as well. In poetry they tended to a renewed formalism, and to the extent they were political, thanks in later part (especially upon, e.g., the Amis family, Kingsley and Martin) to the pioneering researches of Conquest in his guise as independent historian of the Stalin years in Russia (The Great Terror, 1968), to a skeptical attitude toward facile, standard-issue go-ahead progressive left-liberalism.