PHILIP LARKIN AS A POET 1922 1985 By

PHILIP LARKIN AS A POET [1922 -1985] By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur

The Movement was a term coined in 1954 by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, to describe a group of writers including: Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn and Robert Conquest. The Movement was essentially English in character; poets from other parts of the United Kingdom were not involved.

Although considered a literary group, members of the Movement saw themselves more as an actual movement, with each writer sharing a common purpose. To these poets, good poetry meant simple, sensuous content and traditional, conventional and dignified form. The Movement's importance includes its worldview, which took into account Britain's reduced dominance in world politics. The group's objective was to prove the importance of English poetry over the new modernist poetry. The members of the Movement were not anti-modernists; they were opposed to modernism, which was reflected in the Englishness of their poetry. The Movement sparked the divisions among different types of British poetry. Their poems were nostalgic for the earlier Britain and filled with pastoral images of the decaying way of life as Britain moved farther from the rural and more towards the urban.

The Movement produced two anthologies: • Poets of the 1950 s • New Lines Poets in New Lines included : • Enright, • Conquest, • Kingsley Amis, • Donald Davie, • Thom Gunn, • John Holloway, • Elizabeth Jennings, • Philip Larkin • John Wain.

Philip Arthur Larkin (1922 -1985) is regarded as one of the pioneers of the literary movement of the nineteen-fifties against modernism: The Movement. He is generally known as ‘England’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 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 Coventry, 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, Kingsley Amis.

Initially Larkin concentrated on writing fiction, producing two novels in the 1940 s. His first poetry collection, The North Ship (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, sometimes tender observer of “ordinary people doing ordinary things” (Jean Hartley) – first appears in his second collection, The Less Deceived, 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.

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 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.

"Ambulances" by Philip Larkin is a poem following the route of an ambulance through rush hour in a city, chartering its course and its meaning. The poem is an exploration of the pervading sense of death that occurs in constrained societies. Although nowadays, death is far less common than in the medieval era, there is still a stigma and a fear surrounding the question of death, and this is perhaps the reason that led Larkin to exploring it in poetry.

THANKYOU! Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur