The 'Movement' was doubtless a force in post-war poetry. But was it—as Robert Conquest, one of its leaders, claimed—unanimously empirical, ironical, and insular? Some of its members were incurably romantic, soft-hearted and keen on 'abroad'. Even D. J. Enright, who edited the Movement anthology Poets of the 1950s, was never absolutely faithful to the preferred neutral tone, and a reexamination which begins with him makes the Movement look rather a hotch-potch.

The bulk of his early poems are set in and around Egypt or the Far East, and respond to the exotic strangeness of those places with a good deal of flamboyance…. Equally, though, Enright's first two or three books [reprinted in Collected Poems] catch him in the act of developing an acute social conscionce—and his view of the world becomes bleaker, his use of language becomes increasingly astringent. The suffering he encountered in Japan...