‘It was a violent time’. Thom Gunn’s description of the Elizabethan age (‘A Mirror for Poets’) could equally be applied to the 1950s. Again and again the poetry of this decade returned to the central theme of violence, yet, constantly, shrank back from engaging with it. Gunn’s own poetry, replete with latent aggression,, nevertheless strove to contain its smouldering energy in couplets and formal stanzas and histrionic poses (‘Even in bed I pose’) as impersonal and self-disciplining as those nazi uniforms and leather-jackets with which his poems abound. The motor-cyclists of ‘On the Move’ seemed to offer an adequate parallel to his own poetic stance:

Much of the writing of ‘The Movement’ tried to explore the barbarous hinterland which recent history had shown lay behind the genteel littoral of western civilisation, but most poems had an air of ‘donned impersonality’ which seemed to brand them as exercises rather than explorations. The doubt was too profound, the revelation of depravity too recent and too raw, to make total candour possible. For many poets, an ostensibly empirical interest in the quotidian became, in fact, a rationale for escapism.