TheNew Apocalyptics were a poetry grouping in the United Kingdom in the 1940s, taking their name from theanthologyThe New Apocalypse (1939), which was edited byJ. F. Hendry (1912–1986) andHenry Treece. There followed the further anthologiesThe White Horseman (1941) andThe Crown and Sickle (1944).[1]
Their reaction against the political realism of much of the Thirties poetry drew for support uponD. H. Lawrence (Apocalypse, 1931),surrealism, myth, andexpressionism.[2]
Others closely associated were the Scottish (as Hendry was) poetsG. S. Fraser andNorman MacCaig, although the latter saw his work fromRiding Lights (1955) onwards as part of "the long haul towards lucidity" after his Apocalyptic start.[3]
There was quite an overlap with theScottish Renaissance group of writers, though not necessarily by publication in London. Others sometimes mentioned in this connection includeRuthven Todd,Tom Scott,Hamish Henderson,Maurice Lindsay,Edwin Morgan,Burns Singer, and William Montgomerie. This grouping was fairly represented inModern Scottish Poetry (1946). Welsh and Irish poets were also prominent.
The other poets in the three anthologies were Ian Bancroft,Alex Comfort,Dorian Cooke, John Gallen,Wrey Gardiner,Robert Greacen,Robert Herring,Seán Jennett,Nicholas Moore,Philip O'Connor,Leslie Phillips, Gervase Stewart,Dylan Thomas,Vernon Watkins, and Peter Wells.
A broader movement ofNew Romantics has been postulated to cover many of the British poets between the Auden group of the 1930s andThe Movement. This is much more debatable; it may be something of a flag of convenience for those such as the followers ofDylan Thomas andGeorge Barker whose style marked them off, or on the other hand a tag for those addressed polemically and retrospectively by theRobert Conquest introduction to theNew Lines anthology. The phraseNew Romantics was used at the time, though, for example byHenry Treece; it is usually attributed toCyril Connolly.
Wartime conditions had posed great editorial difficulties, and the London operations of the publishers such asTambimuttu,Grey Walls Press andFortune Press had been stopgaps.
Kenneth Rexroth produced a post-war anthology covering the period, but it had little circulation in the UK. Another view was that fromJohn Lehmann'sNew Writing.
By 1953John Heath-Stubbs could write of the New Romantics as a movement of the past, though acutely singling outW. S. Graham under the heading of in it, though not of it. This was in the introduction to an anthologyImages of Tomorrow, which also points out that the debate over the 'romanticism' was also a fissure within the Christian poets over style—indeed harking back to the religious and psychological depths ofapocalypse.
