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Philip Larkin

His work consist of four volumes of poetry and two novels:

The North Ship (1945)


The Less Deceived (1955)
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
High Windows (1974)
Jill (1946)
A Girl in winter (1947)

Philip Larkin said I like poems to preserve things I have seen, thought, felt. I feel
that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which Im trying to keep
from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this? I have no idea, but I think the
impulse to preserve lays at the bottom of all art. In his most successful poems,
Larkin appears to be cherishing the past, because it is inviolable, because it is,
paradoxically the only thing which time cannot change.
Larkins work was greatly influenced by T.S. Eliott, Yeats and Thomas Hardy. Larkins
poetry has been characterized by the critic Gene Heartly as combining an ordinary
colloquial style, clarity, a quiet, reflective tone, ironic understatement and a direct
engagement with common place experiences. The mature Larkin style is that of
the detached observer, who looks at ordinary people doing ordinary things.
The critic Terrance Hawkes stated that most of the poems in the volume The North
Ship are metaphoric in nature, heavily endebted to Yeats symbolic lyrics. In his
subsequent development, Larkins style, is, according to Hawkes, not a movement
from Yeats to Hardy, but rather a surrounding of the yeatsian moment (the
metaphor) within a hardiesque frame.
Larkins poetry revolves around two losses: the loss of modernism, which manifests
itself as the desire to find a moment of epiphany and the loss of England, or better
said, the loss of the British Empire.
Larkins style is characterized by recurring themes and subjects which include death
and fatalism. In 1972, the poem Going, going expresses a romantic fatalism
regarding the future of England, regarding the destruction of the countryside. The
poem ends with a blunt statement I just think it will happen soon.
The critic Neil Powel afirmed that It is probably fair to say that Philip Larkin is less
highly regarded in academic circles than Donald Davy. Tijana Stoicovic wrote
Philip Larkin is an excellent example of the plain style in modern times. The critic
S.K. Chattergee said Larkins poetry responds strongly to changing economical,
socio political, literary and cultural factors.
The critic Alan Jones writes that Larkin avoided the metropolitan, the group label,
and embraced the provincial and the purely personal. Peter King said that Larkin

composed poetry that reflects the dreariness of post-war provincial England and
the spiritual desolation of a world in which men have shed the last rags of religious
faith that once lent meaning and hope to human lives.
England was Larkins emotional territory to an excentric degree: the poet distrusted
travel abroad and professed ignorance of all foreign literature, including the modern
American poetry. He desperately tried to avoid the clichees of his own culture, such
as the tendency to dig into an artists childhood. Remembering his early years,
Larkin called them unspent and boring.
Larkin joined The Movement because it promoted some sort of common sense
return to more traditional techniques. Larkin wanted more clarity and more
precision. The Movement promoted a mixture of rationality with feeling of objective
control with subjective abandon. These poets centred around the ideas of honesty
and realism about self and the outside world.
The critic Ian Hamilton wrote in Sunday Times: Larkin was able to accommodate
a talking voice to the requirements of strict meters and tight rhymes and he had a
faultless ear for the possibilities of the iambic line. David Timms noticed that Larkin
perfectly used the devices of meter and rhyme for specific effects.His language is
never flat, unless he intends it to be so for a particular reason and his diction is
never stereotyped. His words will precisely express what he intends.
Peter King afirms that Larkins best poems are rooted in actual experiences and
convey a sense of place and situation, people and events which gives an
authenticity to the thoughts that are then usually raised by the poets observation
of the scene.
Pearl Bell concluded that Larkins poetry fits with unresisting precision into
traditional structures, filling them with the melancholy truth of things, in the
shrunken, vulgarised and parohial England of the 1970s.

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