Literary movements are slippery things. They tend to be about egos, politics and rhetoric as much as actual writing. So it's refreshing to revisit the story of one of the 20th century's least likely groupings  the Movement  and discover it was all about poems rather than people.

The Movement kicked off in October 1954 when a leading article in the Spectator (written anonymously by its literary editor, JD Scott) mischievously identified the first significant trend in postwar British literature as, simply, "the Movement". This was a group of young writers united by their "anti-phoney" tendencies, a phrase from JD Salinger's 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye  and by their being "bored by the despair of the 40s, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility".

The canonical list of Movement members didn't emerge until 1956, when Robert Conquest edited the poetry collection New Lines and put into it the work of nine authors: Kingsley Amis, Conquest himself, Donald Davie, DJ Enright, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain. It was a remarkable volume, not least because of its blunt editorial declaration that these authors represented the "restoration of a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry, of the principle that poetry is written by and for the whole man". The authors would soon go their different ways. Yet the tone of rational attack they shared, together with an unsentimental dedication to describing the present, proved enduring.

The 17 essays Zachary Leader has compiled here are inevitably, and properly, weighted towards the two most notable authors on the list, Amis and Larkin. To see this pair as young men, rather than the crusty couple of literary folklore, is to rediscover something quietly radical in their work: a rebellion against all notions of what it means to be studiously "literary" that today can seem commonplace, but that was worked out from first principles with rigour and admirable decorum.

As several of the essays explore, the crux of this revolt was a simple question: what, now, was a legitimate subject for serious poetry if you wanted an audience to read and to enjoy it? The question was put another way by Donald Davie in his 1957 poem "Rejoinder to a Critic", which asks: "How dare we now be anything but numb?", a query often cited as proof that the Movement authors believed that only a modest, ironical style was fit for the postwar world. Yet Davie's sentiment draws its force from a yearning that is more than rhetorical, and that Larkin and Amis gave perhaps keenest voice of all to. Could literature still dare to sing out in public, even after two world wars? And, if you did still wish to celebrate love, nature, tradition, how could this be done without collapsing into pastiche or bathos? As James Fenton points out, the battle "against fakery" could itself become a paralysing process .

There are few authors who have more carefully or passionately tested the limits of what remains possible for serious, public literature than the nine gathered in New Lines. And Conquest  the last still living  sums up with appropriate concision in his concluding essay: "I am still proud of you, and of myself for presenting you at, I hope, your best."

The 1950s writers conventionally grouped as "the Movement" - Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, John Wain and a few others - were famous for their studiously commonsensical bearing. "A neutral tone is nowadays preferred", Davie wrote in his poem "Remembering the Thirties", and the Movementeers liked to present themselves as being passionate only about moderation, zealous only in their distaste for displays of zeal. Although some of their energy came from social mobility - the typical Movement writer was Oxbridge-educated but not posh, and in revolt against patrician cultural pretensions - few of them resembled young men on the move. "Those pipes and spectacles," Blake Morrison marvels in the opening essay in Zachary Leader's collection, "those tweed jackets, and (in John Wain's case) that proletarian flat cap." Craig Raine reaches for another characteristic set of props when discussing Larkin's mature persona: "Away went the elaborate bow ties and on came the bicycle clips."

Another thing that most of these writers had in common was denying that the Movement was much of a movement; so one of the first questions reconsidered in Leader's book concerns their status as a group. In the wake of some vigorous logrolling by Wain and Amis, the Movement tag was invented by a Spectator journalist in 1954, and there were immediate grumblings. "Well, what a load of bullshit that was in the Spr about the new movt. etc.", Amis wrote to Larkin, adding that another admiring critic needed to be told "to pipe down a little before people think he's buggering all our arses". Two years later, Robert Conquest's anthology New Lines - which became the received Movement membership list - was as concerned with dissociating its chosen writers from lesser beneficiaries of the hype that had been whipped up as it was with poetic principles. Conquest even wrote a paragraph "specifically rejecting the Movement appellation".

There was a certain amount of disingenuousness in all this. (Davie later wrote that he remembered "nothing so distastefully as the maidenly shudders with which I wished to know nothing of the machinery of publicity even as I liked publicity and profited from it".) Even so, it's good to be reminded that, if there was something in the air in the mid-50s, each participant had a different idea of what it was. Thanks to Larkin's poetic pre-eminence, and his and Amis's increasingly non-jokey condemnations of all things modernistic, foreign and leftwing, the Movement is often thought of as a strictly derrière-garde affair. Yet Davie became a hard-line fan of Ezra Pound; nearly all Gunn's interests were distinctly un-Amis-like; and even Larkin had more use for French poetry than he liked to admit. As for politics, Eric Homberger's essay points out that the New Lines poets were admired in their day as humanists and liberals rather than reactionaries.

Though some would switch Amis's and Gunn's names around, Leader's subtitle reflects the chief Movementeers' current critical ranking, and Larkin inevitably dominates the book. James Fenton speaks of the "ugliness tax" that Larkin's poems exact before their beautiful moments, and Raine looks at the poet's closeted romanticism, too (though he's unsparing about the obscurities - "I am unsure what this third line means" - and forced rhymes in the middle section of "An Arundel Tomb"). The most absorbing essay in the book, however, is Terry Castle's "The Lesbianism of Philip Larkin", which connects the bizarre Sapphic schoolgirl tales that Larkin amused himself with in his youth to the gloomily girl-starved voice of the later poems. In addition to making a crazy-sounding argument persuasive, Castle shows that it's possible to write wittily and sensitively about aspects of Larkin's life that usually get treated with horror, jeers or indignant defensiveness.

Gunn and Amis are covered a bit more patchily. Alan Jenkins is good on what Ian Hamilton once called Gunn's early "doctrine of butch self-reliance" ("It's better . . . / To be insensitive, to steel the will, / Than sit irresolute all day at stool / Inside the heart"), as is Fenton on Amis's verse. Yet Gunn's later work was essentially non-Movement-y: gay sex and methamphetamine use were one thing, but his appreciation of American modernism surely put him beyond the pale. As for Amis, the book's strong focus on poetry means that there's no stand-alone essay on his fiction - or, for that matter, on Wain's briefly celebrated novel Hurry On Down. More generally, Colin McGinn links the Movement with the ordinary language philosophy being done at the time; Clive Wilmer and William Pritchard write well about Davie's criticism; and Leader has extracted a lively essay from Conquest, the last surviving Movementeer.

Was the Movement, in the final analysis, and considered strictly though the lens of New Lines, worth the hype? Karl Miller equivocates interestingly: "it was a clearing of the air which deserves to be thought more than ephemeral and rather more than a clearing of the air." The consensus seems to be that it was a hygienic, stable-cleaning exercise for which we should be grateful, though in a sense it has suffered from its own success: as Fenton points out, the waffling poetry of the 40s has been so thoroughly forgotten that few people remember the stuff they were combating. Several contributors also make the point that the Movement's strict verse forms and dogged "common mannerism" coexisted with some highly turbulent emotional lives. Between them, Conquest's writers had almost as impressive a collection of drink problems and nervous breakdowns as the confessional poets who succeeded them in the 60s. In that context, at least, their technical polish and low-key self-dramatisations can be made to seem moving and even a little - whisper it - heroic.