Philip Larkin Poetry Analysis

Philip Larkin verse AnalysisIntroductionMeaning of the Term endeavourThe Movement is link to the work and concept of a group of poets of the nineteen-fifties entirely. The poets were Donald Davie, Kingsley Amis, bradawl Gunn, and m any(prenominal) more than. Philip Larkin (1922-1985), who was as well as one of the poets greatly believed to be closely related to it. These poets believed to ache casted a rebellion against the raised wild-eyedism and sensuousness from the nineteen-thirties to nineteen-fifties. The work of these poets was regarded and regarded as victorious of common sense and clarity over abstruseness and mystification. It was regarded as a verbal restraint over stylistic excessive. Philip Larkin subtly deflates the old(prenominal) romantic childhood idyllic associated with former(a) writers such(prenominal)(prenominal) as D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas. such(prenominal) characteristics were a source of enduring popularity for readers of that time.Stark and N aked Realities in Philip Larkins PoetryThe nineteen-fifties was filled with a time when the universal attitude of the people and the writers was exceedingly anti-romantic and largely anti- exalted. The World War II had come to a handicap in 1945 and the euphoria caused over the defeat of the Nazi including fascist nations, and withal of imperialist Japan too soon ended.This gave ways to a looking at of despondency and rejection over the impairment which hitherto the victorious Allies had to stand in great. Worldly, the Germans bombing raids over Britain had inflicted enormous damage on the nation including the territories and thousand and millions of lives had been already lost. As a result, there was an air of disenchantment and disenchantment among the commoners as well as among the writers, poets, authors and artists of that time. A writer wish well Philip Larkin was more committed to a realistic and naturalistic display of bearing and the actual conditions of sustenan ce over the region could non fall in contri moreovered a romantic a real halo or a heroic quality to the life which he unavoidably interpreted in his numberss. The metropolis was clearly more than a place of comic disparagement for this writer. He could non have re onlyy portrayed heroes andtheir heroismon the face of the miseries, constraints and the financial problems which the country was experiencing at that time. The Wel furthermoste State was established however the results of that were non to real and comforting.It had been received by many critics through their criticisms that the poets of that time during Movement did not at all existed as a literary group. plainly it has to a fault been ac fellowshipd that these poets basically operated in a signifi hobot cultural and affable influence. The Movement was the product of the specific witnesss about(predicate) both literature and order and it in its turn helped to establish and to circularize and comment on suc h views.Philip Larkin wanted only to show the stark, crude, muffle realities of life in his poems and emerged as an extreme kind of all anti-heroes. He mocked at himself and overly mocked at the people as well as the conditions that surrounded him. Wherever he found any chances of reinventing feature in social, economical and political life of the country he did not close his eyeball to it but he instead was even keener and gloomily much aware of the sordidness of the commercialized, commodifiedand consumerised society. many of his poems are based on self-awareness and most of them also contain also sharp criticisms on the society encompassing him. The unwillingness to tell lies, accuracy and fidelity to the actual state of affairs were the three most disposal principles of Philip Larkins numbers. His poetry is truthful, and he does not try to impart any witch or glitter to life as he saw it. He does not try to romanticize homo relationships, not even the get along relation ship betwixt men and women. To conclude, he does not depict himself as main protagonist of any sort and he does not depict any heroic individuals with codes of honor as seen in Greek literatures. In his poetry,there are no warriors and no knights-at-arms in his poetry. There are also no Romeos and Juliets of Shakespeare in his poetry. There are no war-like deed in his poetry, and there is no tendency at all forthe glorification of human beings or human relationships. We observe much of stark and naked realities in his poetry.CONTENTNo Romance for Larkin in Love and MarriageAn Arundel Tomb(published in 1964) is a poem consisting of 7 verses with 6 lines distributively which is about an Earl of Arundel and his Countess or second wife. The poet here recognizes the feelings of mutual appurtenance between them in a way the sculptor has depicted them as keeping hands of each opposite. but Larkin does not romanticize and bring out the feelings of joyfulness ofthis attachment and bond ing between them. In the reversal, he expresses the view that this beautifully holding of hands was necessarily the sculptors discovery and not a representation of an actual or momentary moment. Henceforth, Philip Larkin witingly looks at the relationship between the Earl of Arundel and his second wife with the rationality and not emotions. In Dockery and Son .Philip Larkin says that, magic spell a per tidings of his same age had married early in life and has a son. He himself had never married and had no son or daughter. But he does notregard Dockery as high ranking to himself because of this situations in life. In other words, he does not comment much on marriage and of children. In Poetry of DeparturesPhilip Larkin expresses a desire to leave and get but then eventually drops upthis idea or view. He does not romanticize travelling in the name of adventures or the gathering of knowledge its avow sake. In all these poems we find Philip Larkin adopting an attitude to the most po lar aspects of life. Love, Relationships, marriage and travel are not in his notions something worth experiencing, rejoicing, fantastic and wonderful. A heroic life is necessarily also a romantic life but Philip Larkin finds no heroism, greatness, magnificense and no romance in crawl in affairs and marriage.Individuals in Larkins Poems in a Heroic MoldThe individuals portrayedby Philip Larkin in his poems are sure as shooting in the heroic mold. The main character or the protagonist in his dramatic monologues is the poet Philip Larkin himself. In these poems he does not cry himself in any way. And in poems where he portrays some other persons, theyare not presented as a heroic figure. The poem Mr. Bleaney which he uses in his other novel as well Jillthe speaker is he himself. Both of them have not been depicted as a figure of heroism in this following poem. Mr. Bleaney is and ordinary kind of manual worker who is modest, humble and retiring go awaying a poverty stricken. Philip Larkin speaks about Mr. Bleaneyas an exposing his shallowness and his uninspiring life. But Larkin does not speak of himself in any of such manners. He certainly establishes his superior nature over Mr. Bleaney because of his higher spiritual and intellectual interests but instead he jokes at himself in the same manner age mocking at Mr. Bleaney. In fact Philip Larkin irony is often direct against himself only. The poem titled I Remember, I Remember is the most subdue example. Here he attacks the romantic notions of his childhood which in other poems he has described as a forgotten boredom.The Evangelist in assent mend Is Pulled Down from his pedestalIn the poem Faith Healing , the Evangelist is not considered as an ideal or quite not been idealized. On the other side, Philip Larkin has given us a satirical portraying of the Evangelist. The evangelist is the one who has great strength, courage and a God touch on figure in the eyes of his women guests but Philip Larkin drags t his false divine violence down to the ground from the high pedestal which he occupies in the eyes of his women deities.No heroic attitude towards workIn Toads and Toads Revisited, 1954 Philip Larkin does not necessarily permits a heroic attitude towards work and compares it to the Satan described as toad. He does not say diddle is worship but rather he says that work is a toad(not wanted) squatting on his life and others. Work is the way which takes a human being to his grave and immortality. Thus Philip Larkin that adjusts himself to a life of work instead of claiming that work uplifts a man. nowhere in his work of poetry does Philip Larkin present to our eyes views of a get by against or a resistance to the misfortunes of life. William Butler Yeats had certainly upholds and applauds the idea of a heroic struggle but Larkin does not do any such thing his poetry.Larkins Unheroic Attitude towards DeathLarkin is an anti-hero in its own writing. He does not even adopt a heroic atti tude towards goal which is the study theme in his poetry. Larkin was haunted, preoccupied with the thought of death itself and in his poems he recollects us of the high inevitability of death. The poems Coming, Going, and Days are about death and the climax and culminate of his treatment of death comes in the poem Aubade. But nowhere does he defies death. He does not follow John Donnes lead where he had said Death, be not proud . But Larkin does not make any such assumptions. He fears death as he flinches at the thought of death. He certainly does not show any fearlessness and audacity towards death. In one his poem, namely The Explosion which is about British class working people where does he exalts death as a means of bringing honour to a greater expiration to the people who were killed in the Explosion or the b death. In general, he harbours the fear of death and immortality.CONCLUSIONElements of Modernism and Larkins Opposition to ThemIn his introduction to his anthology The in the buff Poetry (1962), Alfred Alvarez attached the Movement poets of the nineteen-fifties, accusing them of an exaggerated provincialism, insularity, dullness, and a blunt refusal to learn anything from the imaginative excitements and the artistic aims associated with T.S. Eliot and contemporaneity. Philip Larkin was the most distinguished member of the Movement, other names connected with the Movement being Thorn Gunn, Donald Davie, John Wain, D. J. Enright, and Kingsley Amis. Larkin was then the chief target of Alvarezs condemnation. In his early poetic career, Larkin had been much influenced by the symbolist poetry of W.B. Yeats but afterwards he rejected Yeats in favour of Thomas Hardy.In other words, from being something of a modernist, he subsequently became a traditionalist, and a critic of modernism. It was as an opponent of modernism that he declared his support to poets to whom technique seemed less important than content, and who accepted the styles and forms whic h they had inherited and through which they show their own content or ideas. It was not simply experimentation which Larkin deplored but the fact that some artists had begun to cultivate a relationship with their material rather than with their audience and he deplored this fact because such artists in his opinion became easy prey to two principal trends, namely modernism and mystification. He said that his essential criticism of modernism, whether exemplified by Charlie Parker, Ezra Pound, or Picasso was due to the fact that modernism helped people neither to enjoy nor melt down this kind of art. Modernist art, he further said, did not have any unchanging power. Such art mystified or outraged the people.Every modernist in his opinion felt compelled to sink deeper and deeper into violence and vulgarity so far as art was concerned. Furthermore, Larkin seemed to think that modernist art, whether music, painting, or poetry, was complex and difficult to explain. In this view he was r ight because such modernist works as The unfounded Land and Ulysses contain quotations from other texts thereby making themselves into complex and many-layered literary palimpsests. In Larkins opinion this sort of thing had encouraged a view of poetry which was almost mechanistic, namely that every poem must overwhelm all previous poems. Larkin held that every poem must be its own sole freshly-created universe and must, therefore, have no belief in a common myth-kitty. Larkin rejected the evolutionary view of poetry adopted and promoted by the modernists. His anti-modernism attracted him to the traditional poets such as Wordsworth and Tennyson. Larkin also admired John Betjeman even though this poet was not directly associated with the Movement. Philip Larkin has much in common with all these earlier English poets. They all used a moderate shadow of voice and accessible language-a language such as men do use. Besides, all these poets were centrally concerned with the relationship between themselves and to the landscapes and they habitually expressed a sense of communion with their surroundings in exalted terms. In other words, they were all intensely patriotic poets. And yet we must own at this point the fact that, although Philip Larkin has flatly rejected Modernism in theory, he is in practice a remarkably wide-ranging poet whose last volume of poems, entitled spicy Windows shows distinct modernist and symbolist leaning which he was supposed to have discarded quite early in his career. Nor can we claim that there is no obscurity at all in his poetry.Illustrations of Larkins Rejection of Modernism His Raw MaterialWe have now to turn to Larkins poetry in order to find out in what way or ways he has rejected modernism in his work. Rejecting the complexity and obscurity of Modernist poetry and rejecting the element of mystification in it. Larking chooses only familiar undecideds and matters of occasional interest for treatment in his poems. He does not de al with abstractions. He deals with the cover realities of life. The subjects in his poems relate to common occurrences and daily happenings. In the poem At Grass, he meditates upon a number of retired race-horses whom are a concrete reality which anybody could have witnesses. Besides, anyone looking at those horses would have speculated upon their present locating and its contrast with their past glory. There is nothing transcendental about the subject of the poem or Philip Larkins treatment of it even though some critics have said that the poem symbolically deals with human beings in their state of solitude from their life of activity and achievement.Lilies on a young Ladys Photograph album is again a poem in the anti-modernist mode. It has as its theme a contrast between the past glamour and charm of a chick and her present condition. The glamour and the charm have now considerably declined but the poet still cherishes a memory of them, and treasures them in his heart. Nothing could be more realistic than this contrast and the wistful feelings of the poet.WORK CITEDPrimary SourcesLarkin, Philip. Collected Poems Philip Larkincapital of the United Kingdom The Marvell Press, 1988 The North Ship, London Fortune Press, 1945 The Less Deceived. York shire Marvell Press, 1955 The Whitsun wedding. London Faber, 1964 High Windows. London Faber and Faber, 1974Secondary ResourcesRajamouly.K. The poetry of Philip Larkin. A critical study, Prestige Books