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"Larkin, Philip Criticism and interpretation."
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Such deliberate disguises : the art of Philip Larkin
Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin argues that a true understanding of Philip Larkin as man and poet lies beyond his enduring public appeal and the variety of criticism that has recently been applied to his work. Richard Palmer suggests that the ostensible simplicity of Larkin's writing, which continues to attract so many readers to him, is deceptive, masking as it does one of the richest and most resonant of oeuvres in twentieth-century poetry. Penetrating the many masks of Larkin, the book sheds new and considerable light on the hitherto largely ignored spiritual significance of his work. Based upon close and scrupulous reading of the poems themselves, it draws upon insights gained from the history of art and the study of religion and myth as much as literary criticism and personal biography. It also brings long-overdue attention to what is seen to be perhaps the chief love, and operative aesthetic force, of Larkin's life: jazz. Such Deliberate Disguises is thus a major contribution, not just to Larkin studies, but to the wider cultural history of our times.
eBook
An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man
No detailed description available for \"An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man\".
eBook
Reframing Astrophil's \sad steps\: The Reception History of Astrophil and Stella 31 and Sidney's Poetics
Concomitantly, the poet is leading you, moving you, to virtuous action. [...]theory, but what about praxis? (Stella is in Astrophil and Stella 16 portrayed as a dangerously scorching female sun: it is not very surprising that Astrophil wants to summon a male moon as his ally.) But Wordsworth wants to invoke the moon in more familiar terms and also to borrow Merlin's power to accelerate her (and to speed up the poem): the Romantic usurps the romantic in this reordering of the cosmos. There's something laughable about this, The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart (Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below) High and preposterous and separate- Lozenge of love! The vaguely hieratic melodrama of \"Lozenge of love!\" and \"Medallion of art!\" summons \"wolves of memory\" that can only hyperbolize ponderous (and unidiomatic) \"Immensements.\"
Journal Article
Sharpened Light: On Larkin's \Sad Steps\
Dubrow analyzes \"Sad Steps,\" Philip Larkin's poem about the moon. In analyzing the poem, she says that Larkin rejects the conceit of fellowship between the human and the lunar while also critiquing the notion that the moon is divine. The poet neither personifies nor defies the moon. His moon is modern, distant, and it stands apart, not only from contact with human beings but also from direct interactions with other shapes in the night's sky.
Journal Article
Behind the backs of houses
Railways in John Betjeman's and Philip Larkin's poems of the 1950s and 1960s function as provocative signifiers that interrogate and encourage definition of what constitutes the modern English landscape. Through their works, which recognize how railways have been held to register the cultural health of the nation from their inception, it becomes clear that the panoramic perception that railways make possible aptly represents the self-conscious cultural gaze filtered through crisis that critics argue prevails in the postwar context. Betjeman's and Larkin's speakers reveal the capacity for railway travel to disrupt the settled vision of nationhood at the heart of heritage-based Englishness; at the same time, railways – and they themselves – are not outside of this discourse. For Betjeman and, to a greater extent, Larkin, it is the possibility of double return embodied by the railway system that perhaps proffers a desirable mode of inhabiting the modern English nation.
Journal Article
Shades of Larkin: Singularity and Transcendence in Derek Mahon's \“A Garage in Co. Cork\”
Philip Larkin's influence upon Derek Mahon has generally been slighted in criticism, although critical work on Larkin and Mahon's contemporary, Seamus Heaney, abounds. This essay proposes the centrality of Larkin to Mahon's work, particularly exemplified in one of Mahon's masterpieces, \"“A Garage in Co. Cork,\"” through analyzing Mahon's adoption of Larkin's touristic pose in his poetry (exemplified in \"“Church Going\"” and \"“The Whitsun Weddings\"”) that enables both poets to apprehend an often unexpected transcendence that inheres in quotidian objects through the process of literary singularity. Moreover, Larkin's penchant for evoking transcendence through his tightly controlled forms influenced Mahon's similar desire, as seen in the debt \"“A Garage\"” owes to \"“Aubade\"” in its rhyme scheme and overall length. At the same time, \"“A Garage\"” employs multiple allusions to Larkin's poetry, including \"“High Windows\"” and \"“Aubade,\"” only to heavily revise and rework these allusions in rejecting what Mahon perceives as Larkin's eventual drift toward death and nihilism, enabling him to affirm and recreate lost and marginalized human, animal and vegetal life.
Journal Article
Darkness at Dawn: From \Bavarian Gentians\ to \Aubade\
The younger was a Movement fonnalist and a curmudgeonly, often sardonic, yet politely suited, bespectacled, and clean-shaven stay-at-home-though also poly-amorous (while horrified of marriage)-a drinker, a smoker, and a jazz lover, with what he himself described as the shape of a \"pregnant salmon\" (Larkin, Selected Letters 671). Motion 43-44), and-rather notoriously, as often reported in newspapers- purchased a Lawrence tee-shirt which he took to wearing while mowing the lawn of his house in Hull.1 Like Lawrence, Larkin was also an acolyte of Thomas Hardy, a novelist-poet who helped ground the imaginations of both these novelist-poet descendants (for Larkin was also an aspiring novelist) in quotidian reality.2 Railroads and factories, shops and beachside resorts, miners and the middle classes-these are among the quotidian topics on which both writers brooded in plain-spoken richly specific texts, many anchored in comparable provincial backgrounds, though Lawrence's was working-class, Larkin's more genteel. If we juxtapose it with the dark coupling that concludes \"Bavarian Gentians,\" in its determinedly anti-mythic stance this aubade also signals not only a repudiation of Lawrence's longed-for \"mar- riage of the living dark\" but also a parting of Pluto from Persephone, wintry death from the dream of spring. The early ballad 'The North Ship,''for instance, picks up on the haunting image of the ship of death to evoke a special bark of desolation that veers away from its life-laden companions to fare \"wide and far / Into an unforgiving sea\" and is \"rigged for a long journey.\"
Journal Article