Elizabeth Jennings Research Paper

Contrasting her Movement colleagues, Jennings never felt comfortable writing poems about popular issues and current events , believing that successful poems absorb writers wholly and completely and not just for a moment .While she admitted that good poems might be written about such matters as nuclear warfare, modern art, popular advertising, and scientific experimentation- all of which had served as topics of Conquest, Larkin and other Movement writers – she found those subjects generally less compelling than the familiar themes of love and death with which poets had traditionally dealt.“ The best poets writing today are those who are more personal, who are trying to examine and understand their own emotions, behavior or actions or those

Her poems of tribute and direct address to famous artistic, literary, and religious figures are on the whole sanctimonious and sentimental. The volume includes poems to Mozarart and Hopkins, “Homage to Van Gogh”, “Thomas Aquinas”, “Mondrian”, “Rembrant”, Wallace Stevens, and Auden. There is a bold but ill-considered monologue projected by Christ on the

(Fraser 349)

In the Review of Collected Poems , in New Statesman, Robert Sheppard compares Jennings career with fellow Movement Poets, contending that her work conveys greater seriousness and mysticism. Among the Movement poets he considers Jennings as the more serious. He further says: “Eclipsed by her fellow male Movement poets, and separated from them by a mystical and lyrical streak, it is right that the New Collected Poems should redress the injustice. Her work has shown various attempts at escaping the Movement style, although the vatic sweep of the early Song for a Birth or Death still strains in its rhythmical and tonal prison”( 22) “Last night I saw a savage world And heard the blood beat up their stairs:/The Fox’s bark, the owls’ shrewd pounce./ The crying creatures all were there./And men in bed with love and fear”(Jennings, TCP 87).Her Catholicism was allowed full expression in poems such as “A Friend with a Religious vocation” but within a few years, the release from social decorum in subject matter led to the more ‘confessional’ “ On a Friend’s Relapse and Return to a Mental