Philip Larkin was a renowned 20th century English poet known for his realistic depictions of everyday life. He worked as a librarian and published several collections of poetry characterized by themes of pessimism, anti-romanticism, and ordinary human experiences. Larkin was a leading figure of the post-World War II literary movement known as The Movement, which reacted against modernism and focused on concrete situations portrayed in a lucid style.

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Philip Larkin

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Philip Larkin
(1922-1985)

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Larkin the Librarian

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Life
 Was born in Coventry, studied at Oxford
during WWII.
 Worked as a librarian in Belfast from 1950.
 Moved to Hull in 1955: Librarian of Brynmor
Jones Library.
 Publishing jazz reviews in the Daily
Telegraph.
 Offered Poet Laureateship, 1984, refused to
accept.
 Gravestone: Philip Larkin 1922-1985.
Writer.

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‘What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but
days?’

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Work
 The North Ship, 1945.
 Jill, 1946.
 A Girl in Winter, 1947.
 The Less Deceived, 1955.
 The Whitsun Weddings, 1964.
 The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century
Verse, 1973. Editor.
 High Windows, 1974.
 Required Writing, 1983.
 Collected Poems, 1988. Ed. Anthony
Thwaite

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Themes and features
 Silence and breaking of silence.
 Oblivion and fighting against oblivion: ‘I write poems
to preserve things…both for myself and for others…to
keep things from oblivion’ (RW).
 Dramatic monologues. Larkin’s persona: a depressed,
elderly, disappointed, alienated man.
 ‘The great thing is not to be different from other
people but be different from yourself’ (RW).
 ‘The less deceived position.’
 Pessimism.
 Traces of Romanticism.
 Anti-modernism.

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The Movement
 New Lines ed. by Robert Conquest (1956).
Philip
 Larkin: a spokesman for a generation that
was turning its back on modernism.
 ‘Larkin took these reactions and made
theme respectable, by showing that the
alternative tradition, that of Hardy and
Edward Thomas, still had life in it’ (Lucie-
Smith).
 Larkin defined the main principles of
Movement poetry as ‘new Augustan
literature’ (referring to the 18th c.).

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Main features
 Reaction against the poetry of Dylan Thomas.
 Sparing use of images.
 Lucid, technical, smooth style.
 Defined themselves in opposition to the Thirties poets.
 Valued the period before WWI.
 Political neutralism - later replaced by conservatism.
 Anti-romantic attitude. Poems are associated with one
particular experience or a concrete situation.
Epiphany: a moment of sudden illumination. ‘Creative
photography’. It was not a cohesive movement or
school, didn’t have a leading figure (as e.g. T.S. Eliot
of Modernism). Larkin is seen in the centre but he was
not a leader.

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Main features (cont)
 Anti-romantic attitude.
 Poems are associated with one
particular experience or a concrete
situation.
 Epiphany: a moment of sudden
illumination.
 Not a cohesive movement or school.
 Larkin is seen in the centre but he
was not a leader.

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This Be the Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

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But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

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Discussion
 Style and tone?
 What makes it ‘a poem’?
 Pessimistic conclusion?
 Meaning of the title?

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The ‘less deceived’ position
‘…we think that we can expel our hidden and
continual grief through the society of others
and through a manifold variety of
pleasures. But we are only too deceived.
[…] But while we are deceived, usually
those are less deceived who at some time
[…] become suspicious and say to
themselves: Perhaps those things are not
true which now appear to us: perhaps we
are now dreaming.’
(Marsilio Ficino, 16th c.)

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The ‘less deceived’ position
Hamlet: I did love you once.
Ophelia:You made me believe so.
Hamlet: You should have not believed
me… I loved you not.
Ophelia: I was the more deceived.
(III. 2.)

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Worksheet
 Philip Larkin has been accused of lack
of sympathy. Just how fair is this
criticism? Support your opinion with
quotations from the poems.

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The Old Fools
What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's
strange:
Why aren't they screaming?

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‘Do not go gentle into that good
night’ (Dylan Thomas)
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

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Worksheet
 Find a definition of the term dramatic
monologue, point out its main
features, and apply it to one of Philip
Larkin’s poems

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Dramatic monologue
 A poem in which a single person, not the poet, is
speaking. (Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Eliot,
Yeats)
 The expressed ideas are not necessarily those of the
poet.
 Creates a distance between the writer and the reader.
 Assumes a listener.
 Involves a dramatic situation: setting, characters,
conflict.
 Gradually unfolds the dramatic situation.
 The voice may speak to another fictitious character or
may address the implied reader.

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Related terms
 Soliloquy: a part of a play where a
character speaks directly to the
audience. (One character present on
the stage.)
 Monologue: a part of a play when a
single person is speaking to another
character (one half of a dialogue).
(Two characters present on the
stage.)

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Related terms (cont)
 Speaker: the lyrical I in the poem,
the first person singular, the voice
speaking.
 Persona: (Lat.) ‘theatrical mask’. The
point of view of a person that is not
the author. (Might be an object, an
animal as well as a real or fictitious
human being.)

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Worksheet
 Read the poem Church Going and
think about the dramatic situation, try
to describe the speaker and his
relationship to the building in
paticular and to religion in general,
and trace the change of his attitude
throughout the poem.

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Church Going
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

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Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

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A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

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A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow
wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

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Dramatic monologue
 Situation
 Speaker
 Conflict

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Structure
 Description of a situation
 Argument about conflicting opinions
 Conclusion

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Worksheet
 Find a definition of the term epiphany
and illustrate it with one of Larkin’s
poems.

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Epiphany
 Gk. ‘manifestation’
 Originally: manifestation of Christ
before the Three Wise Men,
celebrated on 6th January
 Literature: any sudden moment of
insight or revelation of a hidden
(mainyl spiritual) truth
 James Joyce

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The Arundel Tomb, Chichester Cathedral

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An Arundel Tomb
 Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

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 They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

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 Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

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 Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

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Dramatic monologue
 Situation
 Speaker
 Conflict

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Structure
 Description of a situation
 Argument about conflicting opinions
 Epiphany?
 Conclusion

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The Arundel Tomb, Chichester Cathedral