Larkin and Audience

Abstract

Often, analysis of Larkin’s writing emphasizes his artistic development over time. Based on Larkin’s own comments, critics frequently remark on his imitations of Yeats and Auden, hierarchizing his poetry volumes into those that have little poetic merit on their own but might prefigure the later poems (XX Poems and The North Ship) and those that best illustrate Larkin’s mature talents (The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings, generally, and, somewhat less often, High Windows). The differences among these volumes, for many critics, are not merely of poetic diction and style but of substance and subject matter, with the later poems more often referring to loneliness and the onrushing of death and the earlier poems showing more concern with romantic and sexual relationships. While of course we can find significant generalized differences among the volumes, we also see that some of Larkin’s primary poetic concerns remain constant throughout his life. He himself states that he is not interested in poetic development, and although he says it jokingly, the similarities among the volumes are at least as pronounced as the developments and differences. Although the subject matter does shift noticeably in the later volumes, I would argue that the shift is less significant than the numerous ways in which the later poems demonstrate almost identical concerns to the poems of the early volumes.