Ph ilip La rki n Philip Larkin This

Ph ilip La rki n

Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

• This Be The Verse is perhaps Larkin's best known (and almost certainly his most frequently quoted) poem. Larkin said he expected to hear it recited in his honour by a thousand Girl Guides before he died. • It appears in its entirety on more than a thousand web pages. It is frequently parodied. • Television viewers in the United Kingdom voted it one of the "Nation's Top 100 Poems".

• Philip Larkin 1922 - 1985. • • • Philip Larkin was born in • Coventry in 1922. His father was City Treasurer, so we assume he is from a upper middle class background. Perhaps all you need to • know about Larkin's miserable childhood revolves around his father. Sydney Larkin displayed a small statue of Hitler on a • mantelpiece of their home. Its arm rose in a salute at the press of a button. His father’s extensive library gave him access to demanding texts such as DH • Lawrence – he sought escapism from his reality through literature. From 1930 to 1940, he was educated at King Henry VIII School in Coventry and, in October 1940, in the midst of the Second World War, went up to St John's College, Oxford, to read English language and literature. Having been rejected for military service because of his poor eyesight, he was able to take a first-class degree in 1943. Because of the war, university life was less youthful and optimistic than it is today. This awareness of limited horizons and hard headed realism is an essential aspect of his writing. Events cut us down to size

• Having established a writing discipline within himself in his teens, Larkin continued to write poetry in Oxford, though little was published. • When he graduated in 1943, Ministry of Labour rules obliged him to take the first job he was offered so he found himself employed as a librarian in Shropshire. • The fact that Larkin remained a university librarian for the rest of his life, was to him, the result of chance. In his poems Larkin frequently comments on the “tyranny of chance" over the lives of human beings.

• Initially interested in writing fiction, he completed two novels around 1945 but a move to Belfast rekindled his interest in poetry. • His breakthrough as a poet came in 1955 after he moved to Hull. “The Less Deceived”, a collection of poems, was an immediate success and established Larkin as a leading British poet.

The Movement • Critics in the 1950 s became aware of a shift in style or tast in the work of a group of poets born thirty years before, whose style was more romantic, like Dylan Thomas. • Larkin was one of the poets identified as belonging to this new ‘movement’ – most of its members were university teachers and a feature of The Movement, as it was labelled was that if valued intelligent, careful, thoughtful probing.

• Anthony Hartley, a critic writing in 1953 described the tone of The Movement poets as: The Movement “cool, scientific and analytical … austere and sceptical” and thought the poems displayed, “complication of thought, austerity of tone, colloquialism and avoidance of rhetoric. ”

The Movement • Most of the members of The Movement came from the North and Midlands of England. • They were influenced by the bleakness of England in the fifties, and, after WW 2, sceptical of idealistic systems like fascism and communism. • They favoured rational structure and comprehensible language. They seemed concerned with not expressing ‘poetic inspiration’ but common-sense reasoning. • By the 1960 s, growing prosperity in Britain brought social change and experimentation and The Movement receded, being labelled as gloomy and dull, parading their “ordinariness and modesty. ”