1: The Punch-Drunk Apocalypse

Writing in the early 1980s, Andrew Crozier could observe with literal truth that `The term "Apocalyptic", broadly used to refer to the poets influenced by [Dylan] Thomas, now has exclusively pejorative overtones'.¹ In fact, twenty years earlier, this appears already to have been the case. A.T. Tolley makes the point in his preface to The Poetry of the Forties:²

In the first issue of Ian Hamilton's The Review, in 1962, two reviewers use the term `Apocalyptic' with the assured sense that it will not only be recognised as a reference to a poetic movement of the forties, but will also, without further ado, be taken as a term of abuse.

Ian Hamilton begins his 1964 article on `The Forties', reprinted in A Poetry Chronicle, with `the routine summary of the period':³

`It is impossible to indict a whole poetic decade', wrote Kenneth Allott in 1948, but he was surely wrong. The decade in which he wrote this, the now notorious forties, has been thoroughly written-off in most contemporary pigeon-holings. It has popularly become the decade dominated by the punch-drunk Apocalypse, the foaming horsemen, and - as John Wain has diagnosed it - by a wartime hysteria which could only have produced such rubbish ...

A neat account of the double bluff, familiar since the 1950s heyday of the Movement, whereby the Apocalypse can be identified with `a whole poetic decade', ...