Philip Larkin as a Movemnt poet

The term “Movement” in literature refers to the work of a

group of poets of the nineteen-fifties. These poets were believed to have
rebelled against the inflated romanticism of the nineteen-thirties and
nineteen-forties. The work of these poets was regarded as a victory of
common sense and clarity over obscurity and mystification, and of verbal
restraint over stylistic excess.
Modernist poets wanted their poetry to be read seriously.
They felt that the modern age was fragmented and that it had manifold
aspects. The poetry of the Movement was intelligent, Knowledgeable,
polished and reactionary against the historical one of war literature and
against the faults of such poets as Dylan Thomas whom Conquest
accused of destroying the taste of the poetry reading public and insiting
on the debilitating theory that poetry must be metaphorical. Also
Conquest,in his articles summarized the qualities of the poetry of the
Movement: “In one sense, indeed, the standpoint is not new, but merely
the restoration of a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry, of principle, that
poetry is written by and the whole, man, intellect, emotion, senses and
all... It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions, and like modern
philosophy is empirical in its attitude to all that comes”
Philip Larkin was also one of the poets believed to be
intimately related to the Movement and gained the celebration and
admiration of Robert Conquest who championed him and considered him
an incarnation of all the principles of the Movement and an outstanding
epitome of what has been stated above. Likewise, A. Alvarez in The New
Poetry wrote that the great moderns, “the poets of the Movement
experimented not just to make it new formally, but to open poetry up to
new areas of experience.” What they wrote was
academic-administrative verse, polite, efficient etc.

Features of the Poetry of the Movement:

A resemblance in attitudes and techniques is certainly evident

in much of the poetry of the Movement that was anthologized in the
1950s and also in the nineteen-sixties, and it is useful to compare such
poems as Larkin’s Deceptions and Kingsley Amis’s Alternatives, or Donald
Davie’s A Christening and Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings. The use of wit
and irony is a prominent feature, and this often produces a poetry which
seems defensive and guarded. Much of this poetry surely strives for
clarity and intelligibility; but there are poems which seem tame and trivial.
The prevailing tone of the poetry of the Movement is urbane and
academic; and many of the poems are too neatly prescriptive and look
like pieces of versified literary criticism. Moreover, The cool, ironic
aloofness or intellectual detachment in some of the poems of the
Movement can be somewhat shocking.
All the poets of this genre display a cautious scepticism and
favour an empirical attitude. Aiming at colloquial ease, decorum,
shapeliness, elegance, they are trying to bring back into the currency of
the language the precision, the snap, the gravity, the decisive, clinching
finality which have been lost since the late Augustan age.
The Movement poets are thus seen as representing a new
classicism in English poetry. This critic further says that the work of these
poets is characterized by a general retreat from direct comment on, or
involvement with, any political or social doctrine.

Justification:

In“Church Going”,one of the serious poems of Larkin where

he presents himself as the average man and enters a church on his way
casually, when he has assured himself that “there is nothing going on.”
He finds that is one more church like any other church, nothing specially
beautiful or impressive or inspiring. He sums everything up there very
casually:matting. Seats, and stone, and little books, sprawling flowers
from last Sunday, brownish now. He wonders whether it is cleaned or
restored. He reads the writings on the wall, and says Amen, unexpectedly
loudly and is abashed. He reflects that the place was not worth stopping
for.Then why did he stop? He often does. And always he ends up like this:
why did he stop here? He always wonders what we would with all these
churches when nobody ever goes to them for their original purpose: “...if
we shall keep/ A few cathedrals chronically on show,... / And let the rest
rent-free to rain and sheep.” Or maybe people would avoid them as
unlucky places; or superstitious mothers would take their children
surreptitiously with the hole that they might be cured by touching
something in the church. Power of some sort, inexplicable, would appear
to continue in these places. But when even
that superstition is dead, when even disbelief is dead, what will be the
fate of these churches? Its purpose may become more and more obscure
as time passes. One might feel that this place is now devoid of its
“ghostly silt”—its spiritual assumptions. Yet we would tend to this place.
It was the one place which cemented the relationships of life—though
today only separations are marked. Marriage, birth and death were once
new relationships. Somehow, he feels, standing here pleases him. It
seems “A serious home on serious earth it is...” Our compulsive emotions
find a home here. It satisfies some hunger in us.This attitude is
representative of modern man: who has lost his certain faith in religion
and yet does not have the courage to let go of his belief in an emotional
way. He writes in a plain language even the ordinary men can understand
easily, which is the ultimate philosophy of the Movement poetry.

Many critics has shown how well the poem Church Going fits
the Movement programme by carefully balancing agnostic dissent with a
leaning towards tradition and belief. This poem, according to him,
appears to be both reverent and irreverent. The poem has a traditional
iambic structure and a lucid, rational argument; its speaker is presented
as an ordinary, fallible, and clumsy individual. It is a poem which testifies
to the persistence of both the English Church and an English poetic
tradition. These features of this poem are in keeping with the Movement
preferences. Larkin’s work is more expansive and more wide-ranging than
that of the other Movement poets. Many critics believe that Larkin is a
better poet than Amis, Wain, Enright, and Davie, though they have not
specified why they think so. Actually, Larkin’s poetry, in contrast with the
work of the other Movement poets, exemplifies a deeper imaginative
understanding of social experience and its contradictions, and it shows, at
the same time, a far greater range of formal and stylistic devices and a
more profound sense of the linguistic and aesthetic possibilities of
modern colloquial English. Actually, the range of Larkin’s themes is too
wide as Antony Thawaite remarks “A list which includes innocence, the
pathos, and grim, humour of experience, the poignancy of the past, the
change and renewal of nature, the dread of the future, death and all that
lead up to it and away from it …..etc.”

In “The Whitsun Wedding”(1964), he describes himself as an

alienated observer who chooses to observe what happens to life rather
than to have a bash at it himself as all other lads...”but the result
“Half life is over now …
And I meet full face on dork momings.
The bestial viser, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen
What does it prove ? Sad all
 In this way I spent youth.”
This theme of a detached observer who refused to
participate the theme of self alienation, is repeated over and over in
Larkin’s poetry. It may provide an objective stand to the reporter who
sees and transmits what he sees in an eloquent manner. Sometimes, he is
present in the situation he describes, but he presents himself as a
fastidious observer of the human scene, as a disinterested and a
condescending outsider, looking down metaphorically and literary at the
others. This is perfectly applicable to his situation in his “The Whitsun
Weddings”. More than once Larkin appears to be more like a tourist
travelling through England and many of his poems are set in trains, many
others make use of shops and shoppers in order to give the flavor of
contemporary England. Such poems are“The Large Cool stone”and
“Here”. Such a flavor is enhanced by the use of direct speech about work
as in “Toads” and “Toad Revisited.”

The most celebrated and anthologized poem of Larkin is “The

Whitsun Wedding” which is considered by all critics his best poem. The
poet travelling in the train from Hull to London for the Whitsun holiday
on a Saturday describes what he sees through the train window. Then he
becomes a ware of the newly married couples who join the train at one
of the intervening situation. That is the main subject of the poem. In fact,
the poem has a wide and inclusive scene of England, not a mere
description of a landscape seen through the window of the train, Larkin’s
journey allows us to see England in such a way that all of England feels to
be on view. The glimpses are blended in Larkin’s observant eye. But they
give tremendous implications. The time is afternoon in a hot, sunny day:
“All afternoon, through the tall heat slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curves southwards we kept
Wide Farms went by, short shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floating of industrial forth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely, hedges dipped
And rose, and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned courage-cloth
Until the next town new and non descriptor,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars”
This description Gavin Ewart believes, is the best description
of a summer railway journey in England to be found anywhere, in prose
or verse. Such lines give an accurate photography-as mentioned earlier.
They also suggest how shallow and spiritually impoverished are the lives
of many of the people who live in these industrial surroundings. As the
journey progresses, the poet begins to notice the wedding parties on the
platforms. The newly married couples are travelling in a journey other
than their real journey to London. The journey of life as T. S. Eliot believes
consist of “birth, copulation, and death.” and these young couples have
reached the midway stage of this journey. The poet, in contrast with the
couples, is a bachelor. He watched both the landscape with the couples.
As he contemplates life deeply, he develops a sarcasting and mocking
scene in his observance of the people:
“We passed them grinning and pomaded. Girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils”
After the description of the wedding couples and their
relatives, the poet once again focuses on scenes outside landscape.
Larkin’s description of the wedding and the chaos surrounding the event
is as minimizing as his description of people. By painting the weddding
party with a brand brush, he makes the event itself seem ordinary. The
turning point of the poem comes at the end shown by the lines:
“A sense of falling like an arrow shower
Sent out of sight somewhere becoming rain.”
Larkin shows a remarkable talent in craftsmanship which enable him to
build up a firm structure in his poems, so as to portray the realistic details
of his contemporary scene in a language which has a recognizable rhythm
and a consistent polishes. His poetry fits naturally into rhymed and
obviously metrical verse which inherits the traditional orients of poetry.
His poems are considered technical and imaginative triumphs due to his
wonderfully inventive metaphors and his cunning rhythms, and the
dramatic use of line endings. Even his employment of the colloquial
coarseness is highly poetical - there’s a constant movement in Larkin’s
mind.

Conclusion:

Larkin has a clear-eyed engagement with love, marriage,

freedom, destiny, ageing, death, and other fat from marginalsubjects. His
poems frequently was a progression from a poise or a pose to an
exposure or an epiphany which celebrated the unexpressed, deeply-felt
longings for sacred time and sacred space with the “forgotten patterns of
belief and ritual” and the most important aspect of Larkin’s poetry is its
emphasis on the ways in which Christianity seeks to accommodate itself
to a world in which the old patterns of belief have disappeared in a plain
language even the ordinary men can understand easily, which is the
ultimate philosophy of the Movement poetry.