Larkin+Biography

 1 Few poets succeeded as Philip Larkin did in winning a large audience and critical respect for such a small body of poetry, and indeed his success may be attributable in part to the rate at which he wrote poems. Because he brought out, according to his own estimate, only three to five poems a year, he could give each one the meticulous attention required to build extremely tight, masterful verse. As a result, each of his slim volumes contains numerous poems that immediately catch the reader’s attention for their precise yet colloquial diction.  His chief contribution to British poetry may well be his sustained determination to work in conventional forms and colloquial, even vulgar and coarse, language. In this attempt, as in his ironic self-deprecation and his gloomy outlook, he resembles Robert Frost. Also like Frost, he worked consciously against the modernist poetics of Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot Ezra Pound, and their heirs, the poetics of disjunction and image. Most of Larkin’s poetry demonstrates a distrust of symbolic and metaphorical language, and a reliance instead on discursive verse. His insistence on plain language reflects a belief in the importance of tradition, a faith in the people who remain in touch with the land, and a suspicion of modern society, urban development, and technological advancement. Larkin stands as the chief example among his contemporaries of the line of counter-modernist poetry running not from William Butler Yeatsand the Symbolists but from Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, for both of whom he had great admiration.  Larkin’s popularity also results, in part, from his speaking not only as one of the people but for them as well. For all its bleakness and irony, or perhaps because of it, his poetry represents the attitudes of a segment of the British population that found itself with greatly diminished expectations following World War II; institutions were losing their traditional value and function, and the problems of empire (the crowning achievements of those institutions) were rushing home to roost. His poetry represents a search for meaning within the bewildering complexity of the twentieth century.  2 The Englishness of Philip Larkin’s poetry is decidedly provincial; his England does not revolve around London, and in fact, there is a marked suspicion of the capital and the cosmopolitan urbanity it represents. From his diction to the frequency with which his speakers are seated in cars or trains traveling through the countryside, his poems reflect the provincialism of his life. Larkin was born August 9, 1922, in Coventry, where his father served as city treasurer throughout his childhood. He described his childhood as a bore and not worth mentioning, suggesting that no biography of him need begin before he turned twenty-one. Although he was not a particularly good student at the King Henry VII School in Coventry, he matriculated at St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1940, hoping to get in a year of school before he was called into the military. As it eventually turned out, he failed his Army physical and stayed in college, graduating with first-class honors in 1943. His time at Oxford had a profound effect upon the youthful Larkin; in the introduction to Jill, he suggests that the war radically diminished the students’ grand view of themselves, and this sense of reduced importance stuck with him in his poetry. Perhaps even more crucial to his development, though, were his friendships with budding writers Bruce Montgomery (Edmund Crispin) and Kingsley Amis. The Amis-Larkin friendship seems to have influenced both men, and their early writings share many attitudes and themes.  While at the university, Larkin published poems in the undergraduate magazines and in the anthology //Poetry in Wartime// (1942). (He had had one poem published in the Listener in 1940.) Fortune Press took notice and asked him to submit a collection; he did, and The North Ship was published in 1945. The poetry in that collection is heavily influenced by Yeats’s work, to which he was introduced by the poet Vernon Watkins, who read and lectured at the English Club at Oxford and with whom Larkin subsequently developed a friendship.  After graduation, Larkin took a post as librarian in Wellington, Shropshire. He claimed that while there he began to read Thomas Hardy’s poetry seriously, which allowed him to throw off the Yeatsian influence. He subsequently worked as a librarian in Leicester, in Belfast, and, after 1955, as head librarian at the University of Hull. His attitudes toward his work vacillated, and that ambivalence is displayed in his poems, particularly in “Toads” and “Toads Revisited.” Nevertheless, he remained at his position as librarian and eschewed the life of poet-celebrity. He died in Hull on December 2, 1985.  3 If Rudyard Kipling’s is the poetry of empire, then Philip Larkin’s is the poetry of the aftermath of empire. Having lived through the divestiture of England’s various colonial holdings, the economic impact of empire-building having finally come home, together with the ultimate travesty of imperial pretensions and the nightmare of Nazi and Soviet colonization in Europe, Larkin was wary of the expansiveness, the acquisitiveness, and the grandeur implicit in the imperial mentality. Many features of his poetry can be traced to that wariness: from the skepticism and irony, to the colloquial diction, to the formal precision of his poems. <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Indeed, of all the writers who shared those ideals and techniques and who came to be known in the 1950’s as the Movement, Larkin most faithfully retained his original attitude and style. Those writers—Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, among others—diverse though they were, shared attitudes that were essentially empirical, antimodernist, skeptical, and ironic. Most of those views can be understood as outgrowths of an elemental alienation from society and its traditional institutions. Amis’s Jim Dixon is the outstanding fictional embodiment of these attitudes; although he desperately wants and needs to be accepted into university society and the traditional power structure it represents, his contempt for the institution and those in it, bred of his alienation, carries him into situations that border on both hilarity and disaster. //Lucky Jim// (1954) is the Movement novel. <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Isolation and alienation figure prominently in both of Larkin’s novels, as well; yet it is in his poems that they receive their fullest development. The speakers of his poems—and in the great majority of cases the speaker is the poet himself—seem alienated from their surroundings, cut off from both people and institutions. While that alienation normally shows itself as distance, as irony and wry humor, it can sometimes appear as smugness, complacence, even sneering judgment. Larkin turns his sense of isolation, of being an outsider or fringe observer, into a position of centrality, in which the world from which he is alienated seems to be moving tangentially to his own sphere. In his best poems, that distance works two ways, allowing the poet to observe the world in perspective, as if viewing it through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars, so that weighty matters seem less momentous, while at the same time reminding the poet that he, too, is a figure of little consequence. When his poems fail, the poet risks very little of his own ego as he sits back in safety, judging others across the frosty distance. <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Larkin gains his perspective in large measure through his belief that nothing lies beyond this world, that this existence, however muddled it may be, is probably the only one. His skepticism is thoroughgoing and merciless; he rarely softens his tone. In some writers such belief might provoke terror or a compulsion to reform the world. In Larkin, it gives rise to irony. He examines the feeble inhabitants of this tiny planet surrounded by the void and asks if it can all be so important. <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> 4 <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The resulting sense of human insignificance, including his own, leads him to several of the characteristic features of his work. He rejects “poetic” devices in favor of simpler, more mundane vehicles. His diction, for example, is nearly always colloquial, often coarse, vulgar, or profane. His distrust of a specialized diction or syntax for poetry reflects his distrust of institutions generally. Similarly, he shies away from the intense poetic moment—image, symbol, metaphor—in favor of a discursive, argumentative verse. While he will occasionally resolve a poem through use of an image or a metaphor, particularly in High Windows, he more commonly talks his way through the poem, relying on intellect rather than emotion or intuition. <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This rejection of the stuff of poetry leads him to a problem: If overtly poetic language and poetic devices are eschewed, what can the poet use to identify his poems as poems? For Larkin the answer lies in the external form of the poems: scansion, rhyme schemes, stanzaic patterns. The tension and the power of a Larkin poem often result from the interplay of common, unexceptional language with rigorously formal precision. “The Building,” from //High Windows//, is an example of such tension. The poet meditates upon the function of the hospital in modern society and the way in which it takes over some of the duties traditionally performed by the Church, all in very ordinary language. The poem, however, is stretched taut over not one but two sophisticated units: a seven-line stanza and an eight-line rhyme scheme (abcbdad). Rhyme pattern and stanzaic pattern come together at the end of the eighth stanza, but the poem does not end there; rather, the poet employs another rhyme unit, a stanza plus a line, as a means of resolving the poem. Even here Larkin’s shrewd distrust of the intellectual viability of poetic forms displays itself: Ending neatly on the fifty-sixth line would be too neat, too pat, and would violate the poem’s ambivalence toward the place. Similarly, although his rhyme schemes are often very regular, the same cannot be said for the rhymes themselves: speech/touch, faint/went, home/welcome. If Larkin recognizes his need for traditional forms in his poems, he recognizes also the necessity of altering those forms into viable elements of his poetry. <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> <span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Georgia','serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Finally, there is in Larkin a sense of an ending, of oblivion. For all his distrust of the “new apocalypse crowd,” many of his poems suggest something similar, although with a characteristic difference. Where the “crowd” may prophesy the end of the world and everything in it, he, working out of his alienation, more commonly seems to be watching the string run out, as if he were a spectator at the edge of oblivion.

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