Her career began with her first book of Poems in 1953 when she was in her twenties three years before the appearance of Robert Conquest’s anthology of modern poetry, New Lines. In the Introduction to the anthology, Conquest discussed intellectual clarity and directness of expression as the distinguishing qualities of the new poetry, as opposed to what he described as the “vague romanticism” of poets like Dylan Thomas, George Barker, Edith Sitwell and others. In this collection she reveals a sensitive personality, struggling to find herself under the glittering, cool surface reflecting a detachment. The first signs of the stirring artistic consciousness are seen in the themes and tones. Self-analysis, a severely uncompromising attitude towards the realities of space and time are the subjects of many of these poems.
The poems assembled in this collection describe the particular way in which Jennings relates to the literary and cultural tradition she has inherited. They draw attention to the influence of her literary predecessors and contemporaries, and reveal herself conscious concern with her power as a poet and her place in the English poetic tradition. Most of the poems in Poems 1953 which have resemblances with Movement Poetry have been developed in the previous chapter so here only the key ones and her development will be traced. As …show more content…
The second began with bits of Yeats, bits of Pound and a good deal of outside help from French Symbolists” (Spectator 56). This first volume not only shows Jennings constructing herself, struggling to see her world as a whole, to reveal the landscape of her mind as completely as possible, but draws the reader into the effort and
The poems assembled in this collection describe the particular way in which Jennings relates to the literary and cultural tradition she has inherited. They draw attention to the influence of her literary predecessors and contemporaries, and reveal herself conscious concern with her power as a poet and her place in the English poetic tradition. Most of the poems in Poems 1953 which have resemblances with Movement Poetry have been developed in the previous chapter so here only the key ones and her development will be traced. As …show more content…
The second began with bits of Yeats, bits of Pound and a good deal of outside help from French Symbolists” (Spectator 56). This first volume not only shows Jennings constructing herself, struggling to see her world as a whole, to reveal the landscape of her mind as completely as possible, but draws the reader into the effort and