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Subject: ENGLISH Class: B.A. Pt 3 English Hons, Paper-V1 Topic: as a poet Lecture No: 136

By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email: [email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No: 9934917117

PHILIP LARKIN AS A POET

INTRODUCTION:

• Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985) is regarded as one of the pioneers of the literary movement of the nineteen-fifties against : The Movement. He is generally known as ‘’s other Poet Laureate’ for his popularity in postwar England. Larkin’s poems prove his mettle in being “ordinary, colloquial, clear, a quiet, reflective, ironic and direct with commonplace experiences". The predominant themes of his poems include death, disappointment, isolation, pessimism, religion and sex. He uses the technique of dramatic monologue like Robert Browning to clearly bring out his

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own emotions and thoughts to speak out his selfhood. Larkin also seems to be fairly employing conventional poetic forms such as rhyme, stanza and meter. Having breaking away from the rules and conventions of modernist poetry thus Larkin embraces the precepts of newly found Movement poetry.

• Larkin is a poet whose very name conjures up a specific persona: the gloomy, death-obsessed and darkly humorous observer of human foibles and failings. His personal reputation has sometimes suffered, particularly following the publication of his letters which revealed signs of right-wing opinion, but he remains much loved for his “piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent”. • Born in , Larkin was the son of a Nazi-sympathising father who worked as the City Treasurer, and a mother to whom he felt a strong, though sometimes claustrophobic attachment. The “forgotten boredom” of his childhood was followed by a much more colourful period at Oxford University where he formed several important friendships with, amongst others, . • Initially Larkin concentrated on writing fiction, producing two novels in the 1940s. His first poetry collection, (1945) was heavily influenced by Yeats and did not yet present the voice for which he later became famous. The mature Philip Larkin style – that of the detached, sometimes lugubrious,

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sometimes tender observer of “ordinary people doing ordinary things” () – first appears in his second collection, , published ten years later. The virtues of this poetic persona, its plainness and skepticism, came to be associated with The Movement, the post-war generation of poets brought together in the New Lines anthology of 1956. Two more collections followed at similarly lengthy intervals: The Weddings (1965), considered by many to be his finest achievement, and (1974). In his final decade, Larkin’s poetic inspiration largely failed, and he produced only a handful of poems before his death from cancer in 1985. This loss of inspiration was one of the reasons he turned down the post of Poet Laureate, offered to him the year before his death, though the fact he was first choice for it underlines the high regard in which he was held, despite his slight output.

THEMES IN LARKIN’S POETRY:

• Time, death, chance, and choice have been identified by critics as the leading themes in Larkin’s poetry. In fact, according to many critics, these themes are the very stuff of which Larkin’s poetry is made. A critic wrote: “His themes—love, change, disenchantment, the mystery and inexplicableness of the poet’s survival, and death’s finality—are unshakably major.” Another critic has said that among

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Larkin’s best poems are many which deal simply with universal themes of time, suffering, and death. According to another critic, death and old age are two of Larkin’s most obsessive themes.

• OBSESSION WITH DEATH AND HIS PESSIMISM: Every critic has noted Larkin’s obsession with death. According to one of the critics, Larkin emphasizes the omnipresence of death, as, for example, in the poem Ambulances. The recurrence of this motif in his poems inevitably imparts a pessimistic quality to them. One critic says that Larkin has often been classified as a hopeless and inflexible pessimist. Another critic has described him as “the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket”. Larkin has also -been classified as “a graveyard poet”. To me however, Larkin’s poems may be saddening, but they are perfectly realistic and convincing.

CONCLUSION

• Ambulances is a beautiful poem by Larkin. Ambulances’ is an exploration of the pervading sense of death that occurs in constrained societies; in cities, especially, death is ever-present due to the differing ages of the population, the inherent risk of city life,

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and other factors. Although nowadays, death is far less common than it was in, say, the Medieval era, there is still a stigma and a fear surrounding the question of death, and it is perhaps this reason that led Larkin to exploring it in poetry. ****

By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email: [email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No:9934917117