Philip Arthur Larkin, popularly known as Philip Larkin, is a remarkable name in English literature. He was a visionary, a Movement Poet, Hardyesque, The man next to door, Dark poet. His reputation rests on his image of a rational, vigilant, emotive and responsive mind to the changing physical and mental landscape. Philip Larkin was born on the 9th August, 1922 in Coventry. His father s name was Sydney Larkin and his mother was Eva. His elder sister s name was Catherine. They lived in Coventry till 1940. Larkin studied at king Henry VIII Grammar School in Coventry. His childhood was uneventful though he enjoyed the usual interests of small boy of his age. At about the age of ten he was writing short poems, articles of humorous and joking nature. He drew and painted since childhood days and it continued throughout his life. Larkin was a precocious reader. He read Butler, Hardy, Huxley, Bennett, Lawrence, Mansfield, Shaw and Wilde in his father s library. He felt interrupted in his study when he was at school. He excelled in English. He had an outstanding appreciation of and insight into literature, especially poetry. Larkin s stammer tormented him much. So he kept himself reserved. But he used this in his self-defence too. He mimicked his teachers and other staff and entertained his friends. Larkin gave attention to hair and dress very much from boyhood. From 1936 to 1940 Larkin regularly contributed articles, parodies and verse to the school magazine, The Coventrian for which he won the junior prize and senior prize. He edited the magazine jointly with B.N. Hughes from 1939 to 1940. As a schoolboy he wrote mostly in the vein of dramatic monologues. 1 / 14
Larkin had early formed some conception of the frustrations and disappointments of everyday life and his poetry proved this. In October 1940 Larkin went to St. John s College where he completed his Honours with first class in English literature. This time, as he had a poor eyesight, he failed his army medical test for joining the war. Ultimatum was published in the Listener soon after reading St. John s College, Oxford, just when he was ready for an injection of self-esteem. In Oxford he met kingsley Amis for whom he had special feeling of talent. Here in the last year, he also met Montgomery who acted as a catalyst to Larkin s own writing. Their friendship continued and proved productive for Larkin s career. In 1945 The North Ship was published in 1946 Jill (novel) and in 1947 A Girl in Winter (Novel) On the other hand, Larkin had an interest in Jazz. He and his friend Jim Sutton had brought with them to Oxford their joint collection of records which attracted many students. Larkin did not like Anglo-saxon literature. He liked Shakespeare. Besides, among his favourites were Auden, Betjeman, Hardy, Isherwood, Lawrence, Sassoon, Waugh and Yeats. Between 1941 and 1943 Larkin had several poems published in the undergraduate magazine, Cherwell, Arabesque, and the Oxford University Labour Club Bulletin. The most important friendship Larkin had with kingsley Amis. Jill and XX Poems were dedicated to Amis. In his turn, Amis dedicated Lucky Jim to Larkin. Amis s rather underrated poetry is sometimes like Larkin s in tone, though he lacks Larkin s scope as a poet, both in technique and subject matter. His novels reflect a similar world to that of Larkin s poems, though Amis concentrates on its comic aspects rather than its tragic ones, which engage Larkin more. 2 / 14
On returning home in Warwick Larkin tried to get service. He got a service in the vacancy of Librarian at Wellington. He did everything there. He took a correspondence course to get his professional qualifications. In Wellington he was in digs, in a cultural desert. However, Montgomery, his undergraduate friend lived nearly and they met frequently. These meetings gave creative stimulus to Larkin. Ten poems were published in 1945 in Poetry from Oxford in Wartime edited by William Bell. As a result of such appearance, The North Ship, his notable collection, was published in 1945. After that, Jill, his first novel was published in 1946 by the Fortune press. A Girl in winter (1947) his second novel gave indications of promise. His novels were meant to illustrate Larkin s early theory that life consisted of three stages; the first representing innocence ; the second its loss, resulting in devastation, the third the struggle, after desolation, to return to a truer and more mature self. After 1950 or so he realized that poems came more easily than novels. As for him, he did not choose poetry, poetry chose him. In 1946, Larkin went to the University College of Leicester for our Assistant Librarian s post. Here also he did everything with his staff. Larkin completed his professional studies course and became an Associate of the Library Association in 1949. His next appointment was as sub-librarian at Queen s University, Belfast from October 1950. Belfast marked a resurgence of Larkin s poetic activity. In 1954, the Fantasy Press published a pamphlet containing five poems and others appeared in various periodicals. George Hartley enquired if Larkin had sufficient material for a hard cover book. Larkin submitted a collection, then called Various Poems. The title was then changed on the objection of hartley and finally in 1955 it was published with the title The Less Deceived. This brought him a great recognition. 3 / 14
Larkin was appointed Librarian at the University of Hull in mid-march 1955. His professional success coincided with increasing literary recognition. His renown grew as new poems appeared in the established weeklies and poetry magazines. Now he began to revised biographies, works and criticize other poets. Larkin, at first in hull, remained in solitude and a little bit reserved. But gradually, he overcame this by joining social and professional activities arranged by the staff. Larkin s guidance helped much the publication Committee. He acted as secretary from the launch of the University s Press in 1958 until 1980, and remained a member of it until death. Larkin attracted the national prominence as well as the Arts Council by bringing the problem of purchasing manuscripts of contemporary writers by foreign libraries. So a body National Manuscript Collection of Contemporary Poets (later writers) was formed in 1962. Larkin served it from 1963 to 1979. He was also its chairman from 1973 to 1979. Larkin was also engaged as the first Compton Lecturer in poetry in recognition of Larkin s now well- established literary reputation. Larkin s famous collection, The Whitsun Weddings, published in February 1964, was received with greater acclaim. The poems expressed distillations of a remarkable poetic personality. Larkin got many prizes for this book among which the Queen s Gold Medal for poetry in 1965 was the best one. In 1970 followed All what Jazz : A Record Diary, 1961 1968. a collection of monthly jazz-record reviews written for the Daily Telegraph. Its introduction, attracted much attention for the scathing attack on the absurdity of modernism in all forms of art. He also worked on The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse for the Clarendon Press. Larkin s last collection of his own poetry, High Windows, appeared in 1974, incorporating some of his most bitter protests to date against old age, death and disillusionment. The volume s success guaranteed his position as Britain s leading poet. 4 / 14
Five universities conferred honorary doctorates on Larkin between 1969 and 1974. After the death of Day-Lewis in 1972, Larkin was tipped to be the next Poet Laureate. The honour, however, went to Betjeman. After High Windows, he wrote some uncollected poems, the most important of which, Aubade appeared in 1977. To the poems should be added The Brynmor Jones Library, 1929 1979. A short Account and Required Writing. Larkin wrote a history of the Library which he referred to as his last book. It was not commercially distributed then. His last published book in 1983, Required Writing, Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, a collection of essays and reviews, won the W.H. Smith Literary Award for 1984. In 1984, Larkin was elected to the Board of the British Library and after the death of Betjeman he was the clear favourite to succeed him as Poet Laureate. But he felt unable to accept the honour because he was writing very little poetry then and he could not sustain the Mr. Poetry image which Betjeman had so successfully created. However honours came thick and fast. He got CBE in 1975, the German Shakespeare Preis in 1976, elected chairman of the Booker Prize panel in 1977. He was made a companion of Literature in 1978. He served on the Literature panel of the Arts Council. The University of Hull gave him the honorary title of professor in 1982. The honour conferred by Oxford Seemed to him the really big one. Larkin was a man of retiring habits. He even disliked holidays either. He had a weakness for women Ruth Bowman, Maeve M Brennan and Monica jones were his closer personalities. But he married none of them. His general outlook on life was very gloomy and bleak and his poetry is deeply colored by this pessimistic outlook. The last and most highly esteemed tribute, the Order of the Companion of Honour, was announced in June 1985. He had a major surgery because he was suffering from Cancer. He breathed his last on the 2nd December 1985. 5 / 14
Regarding the influence of other poets on Larkin, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Yeats and Thomas Hardy should be mentioned. As a mature poet, Hardy influenced him much. Hardy changed his thought process with a realistic view of life. He was beginning to feel what Hardy was writing. Philip Larkin is also associated with the Movement Poets like Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, Kingsley Amis, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings and John Holloway. However Larkin did not share all the features of the Movement Poets. He could sympathies with others, because he wrote in a mode of direct and personal response to particular experiences. Larkin never eschewed the great theme on principle nor the heightened diction that was necessary for its statement. He wrote on those themes that were of perennial importance: the conflict between what we are and what we can imagine ourselves to be, the destructive effects of time, suffering as it hurts, and as it matures us, the endlessly complex relationships between people, the urge to slough off what Yeats called all this complexity of mire and blood. In common with Dr Johnson Larkin saw in life much to be endured and little to be enjoyed. Technically he was an extraordinary and accomplished poet. His forms are traditional rather than modern, though they are various and unmistakably a full response to contemporary life. Larkin was a man of extraordinary complexity and contrast; a man of many facets. The public image of reserved personality hermit of Hull, the Churlish misanthropist, a pessimist was refuted by the private persona. The inner man was full of contradictions. He was a compassionate man, his observations were often keenly acerbic. A modest man, he did not suffer fools gladly. A man of remarkable intellect, he loved the commonplace. He took refuge in solitude, but was dependent on close friends. He was nervous in public but his delivery was confident, urbane, witty and polished. He was a professed agnostic yet he envied those with religious faith. In spite of his life long fear of death, he tackled it head-on in his poetry. He was one of those rare people, larger than life, whose presence long after death remains palpable. THE NORTH SHIP: IMPLYING FRIGHTENING IMPLICATIONS The North Ship, published in 1945, is not more than juvenilia. Larkin himself accepts his 6 / 14
beginning efforts as impressions of three major poets: Looking back, I find in the poems not are abandoned self but several the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the, only alternative to old fashioned poetry : the undergraduate, whose work a friend affable characterised as Dylan Thomas ; but you ve a sentimentality that s all your own and the immediate post-oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from, the local girls School. This search for a style was merely one aspect of general immaturity. (Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982, 28) Despite Larkin s admission, one can find no trace of Dylan Thomas in The North Ship: Anthony Thwaite connecting on this said that he could find no trace of Dylan Thomas in The North Ship but Yeats was certainly impressionable to Larkin and there are marks of obvious influence, for E.g. the poem XX. His lift with his bosom friend Bruce Montgomery added much to his self criticism, depression and loneliness. These are some of the reasons which gave a colour of maudlin melancholy to T he North Ship. The titular poem The North Ship is a sequence of fine short poems with an allegorical narrative framework. One introduces the north ship depicted in a pattern to journey of three ships, one is distinguished from the other two right in the first stanza. The first ship is on a journey to the west and is propelled by a favourable mind to a rich country whereas the second goes into the opposite direction to the east and faces the hostility of the wind. The third ship is the north ship that travels for an adventure. Compared to the first two ships the north ship is given a colour of significance, more so is elevated to the level of a legend. The ship is symbolically representative of the human conditions in which the ship stands for individual the sea for life and the wind projects the odds of life constituting circumstantial problems. The north ship is representative of an existence that encounters the hazards and proves its fortitude towarding the process of journey. In contrast the two ships are on a different level of meaning The west ship moves effortlessly whereas the east hip fights all hazards but in vain. 7 / 14
The second poem shifts the focus from the ship to the mindscape of the narrator who happens to be a member of the crew. The speaker is haunted by a recurrent nightmare which warns him against his ship being perilously struck in the sea. The third section Fortunetelling show the ship moving to North where the narrator happens to meet a fortune teller who predicts his having an erotic experiences with a girl. The fourth, titled Blizzard objectifies the tumult in the speaker s mind as he gathers the image of the girl Who will take no lovers/till she winds me in her hair (305). The muddledom of the speaker is further intensified by a drunken boatswain singing A woman has ten claws a picture of terrific sexual commitment. Thus The North Ship began with an attempt to explore life but closes on the note of sexual obsession of the speaker with a female lover. All through the length of the poem, the female figure remains a fantasy figure and never appears in flesh and blood in the real world. The poem s dreamy evocation of remote coldness merging with sexual fear suggests how Larkin used the Yeatsian model as a way of externalizing and mythologizing his own psychology. THE LESS DECEIVED: PORTRAYING SAD-EYED REALISM The Less Deceived, published in 1955, is a collection of twentynine poems. The poems in this collection show the poet Larkin capable of strong feeling and conveying strong feeling in poetry. Strong feeling and gloomy temperament are characteristic features of this book. The collection was originally named as Various Poems but on the objection of its publisher George Hartley, Larkin renamed it after one of the poems Deceptions. Larkin wrote to Hartley that he did not want an ambiguous title or one made any claims to policy or belief. The Less Deceived would give a certain amount of sad-eyed and clear-eyed realism. 8 / 14
In line with Hardy his poetic strategy includes a major role of personal experience of everyday life. Though Larkin s poems are full of personal experience but the title-giving poem Deceptions tells someone else s story. It gives an account of past events he read in Mayhew s London Labour and the London Poor published in 1851. A young woman was drugged and raped later. She was inconsolable and wanted to be killed or sent back to her aunt. Larkin was sensitive to her pain even from distance. Larkin rendered her bitterness of sorrow and lacerating pain vividly in the poem. He used various sound patterns, technical devices and diction well to produce the effect. However, Larkin s big finish lies in the fact that Larkin starts with an event which develops into a general statement that rapist s sexual fulfilment is an illusion. He is more deceived than his victim. On the other hand, suffering develops man s awareness of life. The girl will grow spiritually and mature by her knowledge. Loss of identity, deceptions of fame are beautifully depicted in Larkin s reflective poem At Grass. It is a poem about oblivion, a poem about the penalties and pleasures of retirement through the symbolic presentation of the retired horses. At Grass holds a crucial position in Larkin s writing when creativity flows from an acceptance of deprivation. Deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Church Going, written on the 28th July, 1954, is masterpiece of Philip Larkin. It is a poem in which the speaker discusses the futility and the utility of going to a church. The discussion is half-mocking and half-serious. Some people would go to church out of some inner compulsion or to derive some wisdom from the sight of the many graves in the churchyard even after the churches have ceased to be place of worship. 9 / 14
Larkin s theme of the problem of time compels him to resort to alternatives rather than final solutions. The solidity and convincing nature of arguments give strength to the poems of this book. Where Next Please is constructed round a descriptive meditation, Toads is an example of meditative dialogue. The speaker, in the vein of argument, complains against toad work as an obvious attempt at self-persuasion. Larkin s so-called love-poems are often disappointed reflections on failure, impotence and helplessness. Although the sexual act is generally believed to bring about fulfilment and relief, a sexual act in Larkin s poems is deceptive, and its promise proves to be empty or false. The war had inflicted severe damage on traditional religious ceremonies and rituals in Britain, and Larkin s poems of the immediate post-war period express an uneasy agnosticism. Finally, the book shows a strong impulse to reject the conventional view of the personal past as a time of happiness. Larkin accepts the real world of everyday life as the land where his poetry is rooted. Preoccupation with death which increases with the passing of years is also noticeable. The poems have the tone of pessimism and seriousness. As a matter of fact, Larkin showed in The Less Deceived that he wrote movingly and memorably about aspects of life which were of great importance to his readers as well as to himself. He was a witty poet with immense verbal felicity, subtle modulations of tone, speaking a language with the idiom we speak. THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS: READINGS IN HOMESPUN MELANCHOLIA The Whitsun Weddings published nine years after The Less Deceived made Larkin win accolades all over the globe. The book went on to win the Queen s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1965 and Larkin became the subject of a BBC Monitor film. British and American Reviewers and critics have highly appreciated the collection Kenneth Allott called Larkin the most exciting new poetic voice with the possible exception of Dylan Thomas since Auden. 10 / 14
The Whitsun Weddings is an exploration of subjects in a broader philosophical perspective in an attempt to rationalize disappointments in order to make life bearable. Larkin upheld the belief that there is an unbridgeable gap between illusion and reality and that a wise attitude of life can make it less impressive. Larkin s poem in The Whitsun Weddings may be classified under various heads, like - serio-comic poems, advertisement poems, Poems of transcendence and poems of negativity Naturally The Foundation will Bear Your Expenses is a comic poem which is labelled as Human number. The serio-comic effect of the poem arises from the mood of irony. The title poem The Whitsun Weddings describes the train journey the train in the opposite direction from the countryside into the city. It begins with an uninteresting passenger boarding a train from Hull where Larkin was working as a Librarian to London on a Saturday. Like Here the physical landscape is painted, farms and cattle s being succeeded by polluted canals and then by hedges and grass. The whitsuntide heat, the holiday mood, the sights and smells of a hot afternoon journey are all captured in a moving train. The theme of the poem is introduced in the third stanza when the speaker s attention is attracted to the noise made by the wedding parties which at first he mistook for porters larking with the mails. At first he ignored the sight and kept on reading. But soon he began to notice and got absorbed in observing all that was happening on the platform of each station the train stopped at. In the next four stanzas the poet/speaker describes the dresses demeanours, attitudes and feelings of all the members of the wedding parties that gather at each platform to see off the newly wedded couples on the eve of honeymoon journeys. In the next stanza, the train is seen approaching London. Some critics feel that the wedding parties have been treated with much distaste. Ston Smith remarks that the speaker expresses contempt for society Where mass tastes and values prevail, and the charming yokels of an earlier pastoral have turned into menacingly actual travelling companions, claiming equal rights with the egregious and refined spectator of their shoddy ordinariness. (Inviolable Voice: History and Twentieth- century poetry, 176) It is true that initially the lonely observer detachedly portrays the wedding parties but soon he enters into the thoughts and feelings of the wedding guests as well as of the wedded couples. Each wedding brings out the children, father and women in their own unique kind of involvement. His attitude to the wedding parties transforms from satire to reverence. The journey by the train ends but the journey of life begins. The poem ends, thus, on a positive note suggesting that something new will grow out of these weddings and that people will be changed, the value of the poem lies in its success in transforming an outsider into an insider and ends in joyous shout - We are all in this life together. 11 / 14
(An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man, 121) Technically The Whitsun Weddings is a masterpiece a splendid specimen of what John Powell Ward calls Poetry of the Unpoetic. The poem illustrates dexterity and picturesque creativity with enchanting verbal embroidery. In this, the collection excels High Windows. A joyful end is the joyous quality and the young couples will bring life to London as rain-falling on the squares of wheat. HIGH WINDOWS: OBJECTIFYING NOSTALGIA This is the last volume of Philip Larkin with two very popular poems like To The Sea and Show Saturday High Windows is repetitive in themes therefore share much similar strain of thought with The Less Deceived, The North Ship and The Whitsun Weddings. The common note of thought is undoubtedly, love and death- but presented this time with a mature experience. This collection also raised the debate as to whether thrift, handwork and reverence are the important social and moral virtues central to Larkin s poetry. The titular poem High Windows marks a wide gap between him and the young. A meditation on this gulf prevails there from first to fourth stanzas. The argument is much balanced and not lopsided as the temptation lurks far and wide. There is a marked appreciative sway from the poet s attitude about envying them to the supposition that he might have been envied in his youth. High Windows compares the state of the poet sickened by existence yet continuing with 12 / 14
life-giving suffering despairing and then rejuneveted in soul by a re-purified idealism. This old man dying in a dreary hospital with his face pressed to the window longing for the blue sky outwards. In thought, the poem reminds a reader of Mallarme s high windows (Les Fenêtres) though Mallarme is classic in treatment and Larkin metaphysical or ecclesiastical too much extent. The title is borrowed from a poem of the same name by Dryden, published in 1667. The phrase means Years of wonder or extraordinary year whereas Dryden s poem celebrates the year 1666- the victory of English over the Dutch, Larkin s poem pinpoints the year 1963 the years that marks the beginning of Sexual liberation. High Windows is poet s higher self, now philosophically mature to realise that the only way for him to fill the vacuum of life which constantly haunts him is to identify himself with the human community, with all its humdrum, the sordid and the trivial and to be a part of it. Poems like The Card Players, To the Sea, and Show Saturday and The Explosion shows that the world is the place where consumerism leads to perpetual desire and a perpetual sense of hunger, where the menace of industrialisation threatens to destroy the natural beauty of the environmental world and to transcend the limiting bounds of life. The poet is empathically immersed in the lives of others the salesman, the, old people, the patients waiting in the hospital and their relatives the Card Players, the academic scholar, the mourners in a funeral procession, the miners and their wives. QUINTESSENTIAL LARKIN: A SURVEY Larkin s poetry often draws upon the poet s experiences, and biographical readings making his poetry remarkably eventful. His poetry swerves between Classicism and Romanticism, between Modernism and Postmodernism, between native British poetic tradition and the Anglo Franco, American Experimental line. His poem deeply registers the noticeable shifts in political, economic and philosophical orientations of the society for he witnessed the ugliness of Second World War, the decline of British Empire, the loss of religious sanctity, the rapid change in British society and striking advancement in industrial and consumerist cultures. It was primarily due to these reasons that each of his collection deals with new themes. 13 / 14
Larkin s first major collection, The North Ship deals with the issue of love, time and death whereas The Less Deceived explores the plight of basic human weakness of self deception and the desire for freedom from the commitments of life. The Whitsun Weddings includes matters related to Socio-cultural issues like the impact of advertisement in moulding man s attitude to life the din and bustle of life of boredom and surprisingly the beauty of music. High Windows deals with the hypocrisy of elitist scholars both at the public and at Government levels. Alongwith the effects of sexual revolution, ethos of a consumerist culture, the problem of alienation and the beauty of the world of nature are portrayed. These features enumerate that Larkin was a devout poet committed to serving muse by holistic compositions. Today so many years after his death, Larkin still continues to enjoy as much popularity as he did during his lifetime, and perhaps even more. 14 / 14