Exposing Bare Lives – Larkin’s Hospital Poems

Abstract

This article looks at a selection of Philip Larkin’s poems which deal with the hospital or the notion of care and therefore all stage, more or less extensively, bare lives caught in liminal situations: either waiting to be taken care of by a nurse, wheeled in a corridor to a consultation, lying on a hospital bed, or stowed into an ambulance. This article first tries to show how these anonymous bare lives exposed in public spaces are constantly escaping the reader’s eye, as though such poetic technic were conveying the dispossession experienced by these bare lives, covered by hospital cloths and, quite significantly, sometimes merely passing. A reading of these poems through the angle of biopolitics, as Larkin actually subtly stages the institutional regulation of bare lives in such public places, shows how therapeutic time and space turn out to partake of a wide regimented system in which individual identities are at bay. The end of the article tries to show how Larkin’s somewhat bare style in fact seeks to suggest that biopolitics, extreme regulation, even medicine or religion, will in fact be powerless when it comes to counteract the experience of death. His bare, common, poetic stance then suggests each human being’s unescapable, common bareness.