John Holloway Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Holloway

Christopher John Holloway, professor of modern English at Cambridge University since 1972, is widely known as a scholar and critic as well as a poet. He was one of a number of university-educated poets who emerged in England after World War II and whose work, appearing in Robert Conquest's New Lines (1956), was hailed as constituting a new "Movement" in English verse. As Elizabeth Jennings notes, "In 1956 and 1957 the words most commonly used about the current poetry were 'consolidation,' 'clarity,' 'intellectual honesty,' and 'formal perfection.'" Following in some cases the work of Robert Graves, in others that of Edwin Muir, The Movement poets rejected the neoromanticism of Dylan Thomas and the experimental obscurities of earlier modernism. Though invited to contribute to New Lines, John Holloway has never considered himself a Movement poet. It is significant that his work did not appear in New Lines 2 (1963). Holloway has pursued a path of independence even if it has sometimes been a stony track.

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