Larkin's Poetry Research Articles

The Psychological Crisis: Navigating the Tension Between Home and Homelessness in Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin's poetry often grapples with a conflict between affinity for and alienation from his homeland. Larkin's literary career thrived throughout the mid-20th century, a period marked by significant transformations in British thinking and society as a result of the Second World War. Larkin, the acknowledged Unofficial Poet Laureate of England, maintains strong connections to regional or national identities throughout his lifetime. Commonly, Larkin is referred to as a poet of Englishness. The protagonists in Larkin's works inherently embody the poet's own personality. The Larkin persona lacks a feeling of attachment to his childhood hometown of Coventry when he revisits it after ten years, as it does not evoke any nostalgia in him. The location of his birth and upbringing does not exert any influence on his recollection, resulting in a sense of alienation from his previous life. Larkin went between several geographical locations while serving as a librarian at various colleges or universities. Larkin expressed in his letter to Monica Jones that neither Hull nor any other place truly felt like home to him, following a fifteen-year residence there. Larkin declined to be constrained by his affiliation with his temporary residence. For Larkin, belonging to a place is not always a matter of choice, but rather an inevitable circumstance. The possession of a rented room, which might be described as a 'one hired box', induces a sense of belonging crisis in a Larkin speaker. The objective of this dissertation is to examine Larkin's conflicting emotions of belonging and non-belonging towards home in several of his poems.

Poetry of Departures: The Endings of Philip Larkin's Poems

This article focuses on a characteristic structural and stylistic device which Philip Larkin employs in much of his poetry. I argue that in many of his poems a shift occurs in the last stanzas or lines, signalled by a marked change in the diction, register and tone, which modifies the original or ostensible viewpoint. These changes may serve to intensify the initial meaning of the poem or to qualify it quite severely or even to subvert it altogether, so that one is compelled to deal with unexpected multiplicity or alterity or ambiguity. Although some critics have noted the change that takes place in one or other particular poem, what has not been sufficiently recognized is just how frequently this happens, in various ways, throughout Larkin's poetry. These changes are also not limited to minor poems; they occur in some of his best-known and most significant work. It is these shifts, these departures from conventional expectation, which allow Larkin to move from commonplace observation to much deeper and keener perception, and to explore some of the most important and perplexing questions of human life.

Philip Larkin, British Culture, and Four-letter Words

This article investigates the use of swearing in Philip Larkin's poetry in relation to English class struggle. The word ‘fuck’, specifically—which was used scandalously by the Sex Pistols around the same time Larkin's High Windows was published –evokes class tension and intensifies questions of who can say what, and where. Ultimately, Larkin's swear-poems reposition contemporary political and generational conflict as natural and timeless conditions.

CHILDHOOD WIPED OUT: LARKIN, HIS FATHER, AND THE BOMBING OF COVENTRY

This article looks at the bombing of Coventry, its representation in Larkin's poetry and prose, and argues that it gave the young Larkin a psychological opportunity to annul his childhood and perform a ritual burying of his father's influence over him as a consequence of Sydney Larkin's fascist sympathies before the war.

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses. Peter Larkin.

Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) xii + 267 55 [pounds sterling]/$85.00 Peter Larkin, Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses will divide its readers. Some will make little of it. Others will return it again and again. My one (inadequate) qualification as the reviewer is that I am not yet sure which group I belong. The book collects essays that have appeared over more than thirty years, but through all that Peter Larkin's critical preoccupations, even his critical manner, have remained remarkably constant. Larkin's predilection for wordplay, for example--inviting the reader excavate the ask from task and so on--is equally evident in all the chapters. Geoffrey Hartman is constant presence in all his thinking, and his prose, like Hartman's, achieves on occasion luminous quality that one rarely meets in literary criticism. The Ruined Cottage is a narrative scarcely raising its above suffering reduced silence (81). But Larkin is far more deeply engaged phenomenology than Hartman, and one consequence is that those who continue find phenomenological criticism alien may feel that Larkin's at times reads as if it had been unsympathetically translated from the French: Without that ontic dimension not even seriality is inhabitable, whereas that can itself be rendered scarce at the hands of the ontic becomes an offerable diminishment from within noninfinity of time (102). Wordsworth and Coleridge: Promising Losses begins Wordsworth, turns Coleridge, and ends one of Peter Larkin's own poems. It is most easily understood if the contents are considered in reverse order. In Larkin's poetry, meditations on landscape fade into and become inextricable from meditations on language. When he gazes at the chiasmic lattice intricate of fern his attention is equally fixed on the plant and the verse lines in which he has rendered it. It is poetry at once patiently attentive the natural world and intensely self-reflexive, and in this it offers the best possible introduction Larkin's criticism. Wordsworth may be the poet closest Larkin's heart, but it is who offers the better clue his critical procedures. Larkin writes in dialogue the critics and thinkers he most admires; Jean-Louis Chretien, Derrida, William Desmond, Hartman, Lisa Mazzei, Merleau-Ponty, John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, all of whom are generously acknowledged. But it is dialogue of peculiarly Coleridgean kind in which the critics function almost like the addressees of conversation poems, who act, in Larkin's fine formulation, as speech-partners whose acts of silence beckon discover the language through which he can articulate his own voice (185-6). They provide Larkin the scaffolding constantly interrupted and at crucial moments even defied that the of Aids Reflection found in the of Archbishop Leighton, but they rarely disturb the monologic continuity of Larkin's (212). Larkin is an admirer of Marginalia, and his own criticism often feels similar. It often begins by commenting warmly on the work of fellow-critic, and proceeds until it has succeeded in reversing that relationship, and the earlier text has become gloss on Larkin's commentary. Larkin sees not just as fellow poet-critic, but as writer who is preoccupied throughout his career by the relationship between poetry and criticism, and by extension by the relationship between poetry and theology. Larkin represents Hartman meditating on the Lucy poems as poised before theological horizon (100), which is the position that repeatedly assumes, and the position from which Larkin himself characteristically writes. He may speak of Coleridge's long journey from his early poetic achievement his later theological prose (204), but he repeatedly finds that journey already mapped out in the early poems, staying with Frost at Midnight, for example, as it travels on to encounter implicitly later, more philosophical Coleridge (167). …

A sustained movement: Philip Larkin's poetics of consensus

The critical reception of Philip Larkin's poetry has oscillated around its apparent dual register, incorporating both an empirical pessimism and a more hopeful symbolist element. A changing histori...

‘One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’: The belated Englishman in Philip Larkin's poetry

Bored, uninformed… For, though I have no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our c...

From Hardy to Yeats? Larkin's Poetry of Ageing

1FNRS and the Catholic University of Louvain

Philip Larkin: a bibliography, 1933-1994

The first edition of Barry Bloomfield's extensive bibliography of Philip Larkin covered the years 1933-1976. This second revised and enlarged edition covers all Larkin's published work to the end of 1994, including Selected Letters and Collected Poems. The list of critical material is much extended owing to the explosion of interest in Larkin's poetry after his death. Every section has been brought up to date and the few omissions from the first edition repaired.

"To Seek This Place for What It Was": Church Going in Larkin's Poetry

"To Seek This Place for What It Was": Church Going in Larkin's Poetry

On Philip Larkin's poetry

Using his seemingly crass and apparently pessimistic "This Be the Verse" as a point of departure, this paper examines Philip Larkin's poetry with regard to the poet's own attitude towards the reader. His highly accessible poems, penned in common language, resulted in a reputation as both a 'poet of the people' and a 'philistine'. But for all its crudeness, Larkin's mode of writing always showed a keen awareness of the distancing aspects of modernism. In other words, he was not ignorant of the current political trends of his time, rather he was consciously writing against what he deemed elitist art. In conclusion, the paper returns to "This Be the Verse" and considers the moral import of Larkin's ironically acerbic "Get out early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself˝.

Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin

Since his death in 1985, Philip Larkin, generally regarded as England's finest post-war poet, has become the subject of fierce debate. The publication of his Collected Poems, his letters and his official biography has led to a radical reassessment of one of our most popular and elusive writers. This new study of Larkin's poetry is the first to draw on previously unpublished manuscript material, as well as on the biographical revelations. But, as the author shows, the relationship between Larkin's life and work is especially problematic. Rather than interpreting the poems by way of the life, Andrew Swarbrick examines in detail the rhetorical strategies which make Larkin's poems so universally appealing and yet so ultimately mysterious. In doing so, he reveals a Larkin altogether more adventurous, challenging and disturbing than his critics, and some of his admirers, have hitherto encountered.

Why Larkin's Poetry Gives Offence

Why Larkin's Poetry Gives Offence

The Turf Cutter and the Nine-to-Five Man: Heaney, Larkin, and "The Spiritual Intellect's Great Work."

Seamus Heaney is haunted by, and his turn haunts, spirit of Philip Larkin. In Journey Back, opening poem of Seeing Things (1991), encounters ghost who describes himself sadly as A nine-to-five who had seen (ST 7). The previous year (1990), Heaney had complained that Aubade, all its heart-breaking truths and beauties. . . reneges on what Yeats called 'the intellect's work' (RP 158).(1) Then 1992, Larkin's spirit responded, as it were, from grave, with his own less formal verdict on Heaney. During his life Larkin avoided public comment on poets whose work was unable to praise, but reader of The Selected Letters now found that private jokily caricatured Heaney as the Gombeen man (SL 636). The phrase, meaning usurer, was employed by Heaney to add exotic color to his evocation of savage and wily Vikings North. But (as Larkin would have been aware) it persists Irish colloquial usage to signify village entrepreneur who lives on his wits at others' expense.(2) Larkin had later written to Amis: I reckon Heaney and Co. are like where we came in. . . . Boring too-clever stuff, litty and 'historical' (SL 682), and told Anthony Thwaite: in confidence . . . [Dunn's] things seem heavy to me, no lilt, no ear, no tune. Of course that goes for lots of people - S. Heaney, for (SL 659). The mischievous reader might thus set against Heaney's Larkin - A nine-to-five who had seen - Larkin's Heaney: a Gombeen-man who can't hear poetry. The appearance of Larkin, Dante, and by implication also Eliot Journey Back is illuminated by passage Heaney's essay Envies and Identifications: Dante and Modern Poet: poets turn to of past, they turn to an image of their own creation, one which is likely to be reflection of their own imaginative needs, their own artistic inclinations and procedures. (5) Heaney defines his imaginative need Seeing Things as to transcend Heaviness of being which characterized his earlier work, and go beyond Poetry / Sluggish doldrums of what happens. He feels has discovered himself, late life, ability to credit marvels (ST 50). This quest for meanings is not new his work, but here it becomes more explicit. In this context Dante and Eliot, as acknowledged great masters of illumination, offer clear points of envy and identification. The example of Larkin, however, is closer and more problematic. Heaney has always experienced difficulty coming to terms with spiritual element Larkin, to which has recurred persistently throughout his career. His discussions of Larkin's work are marked by an undertone of concession and reservation. In 1976 defined him as the poet of rational light. Larkin's poetry, said, gives us the bright senses of words worn clean literate conversation, whose ancestry lies moment when Middle Ages are turning secular. Heaney concluded: would seem that has deliberately curtailed his gift for evocation, for resonance, for symbolist frissons (P 164-5). In 1982, aware that description is scarcely adequate to author of Here, High Windows, and Absences, corrected his earlier version, conceding existence Larkin's work of moments which, deserve to be called visionary (GT 16): Larkin also had it him to write his own version of Paradiso. It might well have to no more than an acknowledgement of need to imagine such attics cleared of me, absences; nevertheless, poems has written there is reach and longing to show that did not completely settle for well-known bargain offer, poetry of lowered sights and patently diminished expectations. (GT 22) But sense of disappointment is still palpable (had it him, amounted to no more than an acknowledgment, enough reach and longing, he did not completely settle). …

Larkin's Blues: Jazz and Modernism

The wonderful music that swept the world during the first half of this century . . . was of limited appeal, but that appeal was new and definite: certain area of musical and rhythmic sensibility was being played on for the first time. - Larkin, Wells or Gibbon? in All What Jazz Russell, Charles Ellsworth Pee Wee (b. 1906), clarinet and saxophone player extraordinary, was, mutatis mutandis, our Swinburne and our Byron. - Larkin, Introduction to Jill Offering an explanation for the source of his (unhappiness) and the source of his popularity (writing about unhappiness), Larkin told an interviewer late in his career that deprivation was for him what daffodils were for Wordsworth (RW 47).(1) Although unhappiness is state we readily associate with Larkin's poetry, deprivation as description of the circumstance of his life doesn't quite ring true, perhaps because is dictated by the alliterative echo of daffodils (and wit seems an inappropriate mode for expressing deprivation). Or perhaps is because the post-biography-and-letters Larkin appears now to have indulged himself to degree even exceeding the norm in that traditional triad of worldly pleasures wine, women, and song, what he termed in an unfinished poem Drink, sex and jazz - all sweet things (CP 154). Whatever the case, more persuasive argument might be made that was not the fact of deprivation but the musical and rhythmic sensibility of deprivation, the blues, which were for Larkin what daffodils were for Wordsworth. For Larkin, the hallmark of the blues was exactly their capacity to express the solitary anguish (AWJ 86) of the African-American's life of deprivation. His praise for the blues and for jazz in general - that is, the music for which the blues serve as foundation - is based, ironically, on an admiration for the sort of honesty missing in the comparison with Wordsworth.(2) He characterizes the blues as a kind of jazz that calls forth particular sincerity from the player ('Yeah, he's all right, but can he play the blues?'), and he argues that the Negro did not have the blues because he was naturally melancholy. He had them because he was cheated and bullied and starved (AWJ 87, 224). The deprivation-daffodil parallel more aptly applies to the makers of the music to which Larkin was addicted and through which he experienced his privation secondhand. It is perhaps decisive for Larkin's own version of jazz and the blues that his jazz sensibility was formed in adolescence. became jazz addict at the age of 12 or 13, he remembers (Letters 416), so he might also have said, preserving the alliteration, that jazz was for him what juvenescence was for Wordsworth. At time when Wordsworth was, by his testimony, bounding like roe o'er the mountains, Larkin was entering his subscription to Down Beat and learning to play the drums. And while Wordsworth remembers the very Heaven of being young at the time of the French Revolution, Larkin's later reflection on his youth was that was his particular bliss to have been young at the only time he could have experienced the pleasure of jazz. Had he died on 9 August 1922 instead of being born then, or had he been born decade or so later, he would have missed all (AWJ 28), since, he notes, jazz was the emotional excitement peculiar to one generation, his own, that came to adolescence between the two World Wars. In another age, he suggests, it might have been drink or drugs, religion or poetry (Letters 416, AWJ 15). Or daffodils or revolution. Larkin's claim to have substituted jazz for the inspirations and excitements of other ages is something more than his characteristic philistine pose, even if is also that. Jazz was, along with poetry, the great passion of his life (In many ways I prefer to poetry)(3) and his reader may well wonder about the extent to which the two passions intersect. Larkin has given readers cause to think that the popular music of his time was part of the climate in which his conception of took shape. …

Philip Larkin and his contemporaries: an air of authenticity

Part 1 Larkin's poetry: The North Ship The Less Deceived The Whitsun Weddings High Windows. Part 2 Larkin and his contemporaries: Thom Gunn D.J.Enright Kingsley Amis John Wain.

“The Rope That Connects Me Directly with You”: John Wain and the Movement Writers' Orwell

No British writer has had a greater impact on the Anglo-American generation which came of age in the decade following World War II than George Orwell. His influence has been, and continues to be, deeply felt by intellectuals of all political stripes, including the Marxist Left (Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson), the anarchist Left (George Woodcock, Nicolas Walter), the American liberal-Left (Irving Howe), American neoconservatives (Norman Podhoretz), and the Anglo-American Catholic Right (Christopher Hollis, Russell Kirk).Perhaps Orwell's broadest imprint, however, was stamped upon the only literary group which has ever regarded him as a model: the Movement writers of the 1950s. Unlike the above-mentioned groups, which have consisted almost entirely of political intellectuals rather than writers—and whose members have responded to him as a political critic first and a writer second—some of the Movement writers saw Orwell not just as a political intellectual but also as the man of letters and/or literary stylist whom they aspired to be.The Movement writers were primarily an alliance of poet-critics. The “official” members numbered nine poets and novelists; a few other writers and critics loomed on the periphery. Their acknowledged genius, if not leading publicist, was Philip Larkin, who later became Britain's poet laureate. Orwell's plain voice influenced the tone and attitude of Larkin's poetry and that of several other Movement poets, especially Robert Conquest and D. J. Enright. But Orwell shone as an even brighter presence among the poet-novelists, particularly John Wain and Kingsley Amis, whose early fictional anti-heroes were direct descendants of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and George Bowling in Coming Up for Air (1939).

Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982

reappearance of Larkin's will be welcomed by the late poet's many readers and admirers. book's first two parts, Recollections and Interviews, provide autobiographical glimpses of the very private Larkin's childhood, his youth at Oxford, the genesis of his forty-year career as a librarian, and the influences that initially steered his poetry.The second half of the book reflects Larkin's literary standards and opinions in often witty and surprising, always beautifully wrought, essays and reviews. His subjects range from Emily Dickinson (were her first lines her best?) to the contemporary mystery novel. concludes with a selection of pieces on jazz music.Larkin is a punctilious, honest critic. He prefers good clear writing to pretentious eyewash; he prefers tunes to discordant wailing; and he prefers home to abroad. Unlike the majority of critics, he is clear-sighted enough to say so. --A. N. Wilson, Sunday TelegraphI read the collection with growing excitement, agreement and admiration. It is the best contemporary account of the writer's true aims I have encountered. --John Mortimer, Sunday Times (London)Subtle, supple, craftily at ease, Required Writing is on a par with Larkin's poetry--which is just about as high as praise can go. --Clive James, Observer Philip Larkin was the author of poetry collections, including High Windows, The Whitsun Weddings, and The Less Deceived; a book of essays entitled All What Jazz: Record Diary; and two novels, Jill, and A Girl in Winter, published early in his career. Reading was originally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Larkin and His Audience

Readers of Philip Larkin's poetry keep writing about it, even though they recognize how simple and clear it is, because they also sense that its most distinctive aspect is indefinable, not just in criticism of the poetry but in the poetry itself. Because this aspect of Larkin's poetry seems by its very nature to be inexpressible, it needs speaking of in as many ways as possible, if the very sense of it is not to lapse. It seems that only the obvious can be said of Larkin, and that everyone who has written on him has said it again and again, in one way or another, since it is as simple and clear as a glass of water. Yet, because it cannot be defined, doubts remain as to whether either his most sympathetic critics, like John Wain, David Timms, and Alan Brownjohn, or his more severe, like Colin Falck, Donald Davie, and Calvin Bedient are responding to what makes Larkin's poetry of distinctive value. Of Larkin himself, however, there can be no doubt. His choice of Ab sences as his own favorite poem for the anthology, Poet's Choice, as early as 1962, indicates that even then he had a sure sense of the indefinable aspect of his poetry that gives it its value. For Absences comes closer than any other of Larkin's poems to being explicit about what is inexplicable.

Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration

XX in The North Ship, and there is that lifted, rough-tongued bell / (Art if you like) from Reasons for Attendance in The Less Deceived. 14 Poem VI from The North Ship; a similar loneliness is described in IV, XVI, XVIII. 15 Geoffrey Thurley describes failure as the great theme of all Larkin's work, in The Ironic Harvest: English Poetry in the Twentieth Century (London: Arnold, 1974), p. 147. Calvin Bedient, in gentler tones, refers to Larkin's ancient familiarity with de feat in his critical study, Eight Contemporary Poets (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 70. 16 No Right of Entry, Phoenix (Autumn and Winter, 1973-74), p. 107. 17 David Timms in this connection remarks: Larkin has a fine dramatic sense, within poems and within collections. 'Church Going' Revisited: 'The Building' and The Notion of Development in Larkin's Poetry, Phoenix (Autumn and Winter, 1973-74), p. 15.