Some general notes compiled from various websites about Philip Larkin as a poet

1. Biographical Details
“I think writing about
unhappiness is
probably the source
of my popularity, if I
have any. . . .
Deprivation is for me
what daffodils were
for Wordsworth”

2. • Born in Coventry , Larkin was the son of a Nazi-
sympathising father
• He had a mother to whom he felt a strong, though
sometimes claustrophobic attachment
• despite several long-standing relationships with women,
Larkin never married

3. • Right wing
• distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance
of foreign literature, including most modern
American poetry. He also tried to avoid the
cliches of his own culture

4. • associated with The Movement, the post-war generation of
poets brought together in the New Lines anthology of
1956
• scrupulous awareness of a man who refuses to be taken
in by inflated notions of either art or life
• William Butler Yeats and Thomas Hardy exerted an
influence on Larkin
• allied Larkin with the poets of The Movement, a loose
association of British writers who "called, implicitly in their
poetry and fiction and explicitly in critical essays, for some
sort of commonsense return to more traditional techniques
• anti-modernist, antiexperimental stance is their stated
concern with clarity 4

5. • The poetry of Thomas Hardy was the influence that helped Larkin reach his
mature style.
• plainness and skepticism
• hard-won lyricism , transcendence
• cynicism was softened only by his skepticism , which only rarely admitted any
expression of new possibility
• satiric stanzas
• disabused temperament
• for all his meanness, there is also irreverent wit and a melancholy mitigated by
his resolve to look at life as it is . Readers came to trust him; his poems have a
sense of psychological scale, candor, and a thorough ease with metrical
forms
• If his vision is elegiac , one of gradual diminishment , it is also one of rich and
nuanced emotional response . Larkin is a great poet of middle age, whose
instinct for social satire amplifies his sense of poignancy
• tenderly observant
• bracing and acerbic

6. • able to accommodate a talking voice to the requirements
of strict metres and tight rhymes, and he had a faultless
ear for the possibilities of the iambic line.
• sudden openings, coupled with the subtle music of his
highly-structured but flexible verse forms, that lifts Larkin's
poetry beyond the misanthropy of which he sometimes
stands accused
• Critics feel that this localisation of focus and the colloquial
language used to describe settings and emotions endear
Larkin to his readers
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7. • avoided the literary, the metropolitan, the group label, and embraced the
nonliterary, the provincial, and the purely personal
• Larkin composed poetry that both reflects the dreariness of postwar provincial
England and voices "most articulately and poignantly the spiritual desolation of
a world in which men have shed the last rags of religious faith that once lent
meaning and hope to human lives," according to Press.
• McClatchy notes Larkin wrote "in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and
remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires."
• its with unresisting precision into traditional structures, . . . filling them with the
melancholy truth of things in the shrunken, vulgarised and parochial England of
the 1970s
• contemporary sensibility, tracing the way in which we respond to our
environment, plotting the ebb and flow of the emotional flux within us,
embodying in his poetry attitudes of heart and mind that seem peculiarly
characteristic of our time: doubt, insecurity, boredom, aimlessness and malaise
• A sense that life is a finite prelude to oblivion
• gloomy, death-obsessed and darkly humorous observer of human foibles and
failings
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8. • shied from publicity, rarely consented to interviews or
readings, cultivated his image as right-wing
curmudgeon and grew depressed at his fame
• Lisa Jardine called him a "casual, habitual racist, and an
easy misogynist
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