A Girl in the Forties: Larkin and the Politics of World War Two

Abstract

The publication of Larkin's Collected Poems 1 in 1988 showed that the poet, whose fame essentially rested on three slim volumes published between 1955 and 1974, had been much more productive than was commonly assumed. More particularly, it drew attention to the considerable body of work that Larkin produced in the 1940s. Since then, it has become clear that Larkin's work should be discussed, not just in the context of the decades that followed the Second World War, but also in the context of what were undeniably crucial, formative years. Taking the early poetry into account makes it possible to go beyond the incomplete or misleading pictures that earlier assessments had produced: Larkin was not just the uneasy Laureate of the Welfare State, or a poet who found his voice by exchanging Yeats for Hardy. The poems written in the 1940s show that Larkin also responded to other historical developments and to other literary influences. The publication of the early poetry has called for a better contextualisation of Larkin's work. And yet, the early novels Jill ( 1 946) and A Girl in Winter ( 1 947) have been available for much longer (both were re-issued in 1975), but there has not been any sustained effort in discussing Larkin's fiction in the context of the 1940s. One reason is that the British fiction of the decade had long been a rather neglected area, although the gap has started to be filled by some valuable studies.2 The 1940s in general are often regarded as a fallow period in English literature, but in poetry the lingering influences of Auden, Yeats and Eliot still provide a fairly clear framework; they also provide clear links to the politics of the