Apocalypse Poets

The Apocalypse Poets (or Apocalyptics) were a network of British writers centred around the largely forgotten Apocalypse poetry movement. Apocalypse poetry, inspired by the notion of Surrealism stripped of its automatism, was a reaction to the poetic dominance of the Auden Generation during the 1930s. Aesthetically, Apocalypticism dealt in nightmarish images, engaged with mythology, and meditated on war. Politically, it tended towards anarchism. Poets Henry Treece (1912–1966) and J. F. Hendry (1912–1986) became acquainted with one another while contributing to the literary magazine Seven. They developed an Apocalyptic manifesto in 1938 in collaboration with Dorian Cooke (1916–2005). The following year, Treece and Hendry edited an anthology of poetry entitled The New Apocalypse (1939). They later anthologised two more collections of Apocalyptic poetry: The White Horseman (1941) and The Crown and the Sickle (1943). By the time The Crown and the Sickle saw publication, the Apocalypse movement had lost much of its momentum and, along with another short-lived movement, Personalism, was subsumed under an emerging New Romanticism.