Stefan Collini writes:

As all this indicates, the ground which Zachary Leader and his platoon of contributors are attempting to occupy in The Movement Reconsidered has been much fought over. One of the chief strengths of the many good essays in this collection lies in their cutting through these adventitious polemics to read the poetry with fresh attention, and the result is to make the writing, especially Larkin’s, Gunn’s and, in parts, Davie’s, seem more interesting than its now stereotyped reputation allows. The contributors fall into three main groups: the poet-critics (Blake Morrison, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert Conquest), though several of them can lay claim to more than one of these identities.

(LRB 25 June 2009)

Oxford | hardback 336 pp. |ISBN: 9780199558254