Study Notes: Phillip Larkin's Poetry by Stefaan Steyn. 1) Phillip Larkin's world and his poetics.

("quiet desperation is the English way")

Phillip Larkin uses ordinary language in his poetry to talk about seemingly ordinary things. However, Larkin reshapes ordinary language to achieve biting irony or harsh satire, thereby showing exactly how incongruous our modern way of life is. Thus Larkin pinpoints the extraordinary nature of ordinary people in ordinary, almost clichd situations. Larkin's poetic transformation of the ordinary world is found in his ironic point of view which links the incongruous and the poignant with the universal poetic concerns of life, death, adventure, love and despair. Larkin is the essential post-war British poet, an apparently modest voice telling the tale of a society struggling with destitution, despair and diminishing fortunes. While this stage may appear to present a petty world of petty struggles, Larkin's scenarios seem at closer examination to be snapshots of a cosmic struggle, even though there seem to be no clear heroes or victors. At first Larkin seems to continue only from where Blake, Dickens, Wilfred Owen, Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and George Orwell left off. However, the burlesque England of Chaucer, the pastoral England of Spencer, the Romantic England of Wordsworth, and the heroic England of Tennyson, and the absurd England of Chesterton or Belloc is equally, though less immediately present in Larkin's poetry. Larkin works in a modest way within the resonance of the entire English poetic tradition, evoking the past while addressing the present. His industrial England is interwoven with the relics of the glorious past. The horror of the present is intensified by the presence of these relics. The poignant nature of Larkin's present England is brought into even more painful relief by his capacity to turn ordinary nostalgia into a bitter realisation that the great days, both socially and poetically, are gone. In post-war England there is no space for grand gestures. Thus Larkin's careful, rational exposure of the myths which lay behind the illusion of greatness rings true. Larkin's cautious use of modest language is more powerful than the use of the rhymes, rhythms and images associated with a heroic, illusory past.

If anything, the abandonment of more spectacular poetic means reminds us in their absence that this is no time or place for illusory attempts at glory, poetic or otherwise. It is easier to make sense of Larkin's style when he is read alongside Seamus Heaney, WH Auden and Ted Hughes. They also draw on the unspectacular world of ordinary life and the cadences of unspectacular language to find the poetic and the quintessential human elements within the demythologised, unspectacular secular modern world. Thus Larkin's poetry is apparently dispassionate and factual, as dry and unspectacular as English beer. However, one develops a taste for it as one realises that Larkin has picked up exactly on the heart of the English tradition - the continuity between romance and common experience, and the ordinary nature of the romantic experience. Larkin's poetry is not without pathos, sympathy or humour. At closer reading this grim comedy is the essence of Larkin's style and thought. An appropriate response to the ordinary horrors of life might be a bemused, almost stoical detachment - a capacity to laugh at it all when one has run out of tears. Larkin is not far from the post-war disposition of the Goons as some might presume - he is larkin' about in his poetry, rather than only always being grim and serious. Although a single unspectacular lark is not a summer, Phillip Larkin does prefigure the post-war resurgence of, a less grim, though less spectacular England. In his combination of the comic and the tragic Larkin is truly the poetic compatriot of Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, and the other purveyors of post-war English black comedy. At first sight Larkin's England is one of suburbs, industries, and sprawling cities, peopled by little grey men, pathetic and defeated, living boring, meaningless lives. However, we are given glimpses of sacrifice and nobility, even courage and love. While William Blake's "dark satanic mills" always loom on the horizon, one might claim that Larkin's ironic consciousness seldom plunges into despair, rather balancing within the tension between the mundane and the sublime. Larkin shows us the despair and romance innate in the common experience of people in the Britain of his time. While a poet like T.S. Eliot uses exotic imagery and obscure references to explore the extreme alienation and despair of people in the modern world, Larkin draws on the sounds and phrases of ordinary speech to show us a world somewhat less dramatic, more homely, but ultimately too, harsh and unforgiving.

2.1) The social and personal context of Larkin's poems: Larkin is one of the more private poets of the twentieth century. Although it is tempting to read his poems as a simple expression of his own ideas and concerns, and some try and link them to his life and experience, this is not as Larkin intended them to be read. One should distinguish between the setting that gave rise to the poems and the subject matter of the poems themselves. Although many of Larkin's poems relate to, or seem to arise from a specific set of events, and one may be able to contextualise these events historically and socially, one should be careful to read Larkin's poems in a narrow, socially realistic manner. 2.2) Points of departure for analysis: Although one cannot understand what Larkin is talking about unless one examines the social context of his time, becoming aware of the English, post-war setting of the events he describes, one should avoid identifying Larkin's poetry with a singular social, historical narrative. Larkin is searching for what is significant within events, rather than only attempting to describe events. One should not be too eager to identify the message with its form, just as much as one should not seek to dig for symbolic meanings where there are none. The wider meaning of Larkin's poetry is not found in his use of imagery as much as in him making available an awareness of inconsistency, of disjuncture, of contradictions in his narrative. The 'decoding' of these inconsistencies lead us as readers into exploring the meanings beyond what is made available as immediate and obvious - the pointers behind the storyline of the poems as it were. Rather than being simply and only an analysis of the meaning of a social occasion, one should keep in mind that Larkin utilises events as metaphors, as signifiers. Rather than only being typical of their time and place, the events as narrated can be read in various ways to acquire a metaphorical, symbolic or poetic significance. The stance of the 'narrator', and the various incongruities in the situations being 'observed' lead one to take ironic readings of these situations. The way in which events don't seem to make sense are as significant as the more self-evident ways in which we make sense of these events as being typical of their time - representative of a broad trend. Larkin presents us with a twentieth century version of Shelley's Ozymandias. We see an empire ironically reduced to ruins, and surprised and horrified humans unexpectedly facing oblivion.

Larkin thus explores the human condition among the ruins of empire, church, society, and personality. It is as if the true nature of people and things can be observed when the play stops momentarily, when the props, the actors and the lines of the play can be seen for what they truly are. Larkin is effectively describing dislocated humanity within the disruption of modernism - if not the 'true' nature of things, at least the moment when the illusions and the falsehoods become temporarily apparent. Many of the poems are structured as a triptych: situation, alienation, consideration. We are often presented with unusual, iconic or significant events. The narrator firstly takes us along into these situations, and secondly removes us from them into a silence, or displacement or altered perspective, and thirdly then considers the significance of this gap, exploring the thoughts that arise from this process of being alienated from a situation. Rather than traditional sonnet form, which this episodic triptych approximates, rather than ending with some lesson, some conclusion, Larkin leaves readers with a paradox or question which no theodicy, no simple comfortable and convenient explanation can resolve. In essence, one might claim that Larkin suggests that one might reject a simply symbolic approach to reading events, and thus, by implication, also his poems. There is no longer any single master narrative, any singular privileged perspective, any 'God's eye view' from which one might make sense of things. If anything, Larkin presents us with situations where participants in apparently iconic situations with apparently central symbolic meanings discover exactly that this transcendental, fixed viewpoint is inadequate. Larkin presents us with a situation where a master narrative has broken down, with the fragments of prior narratives as it were, rather than with a poem as a master-narrative. We are left with incomplete love songs, disrupted heroic sagas, abandoned meditations. Thus no single, definitive meaning of any particular poem is available, though this does not mean that Larkin is saying nothing at all, or that any arbitrary reading of his poetry can be defended. To the contrary, Larkin's thematic concerns are clear, if not reducible to simple, unpoetic, statements of fact - historical, ideological or otherwise. One should be careful to merely 'decode' a Larkin poem he is writing poetry, not history. Larkin has definite concerns, he is concerned with reality. As Larkin debunks myth one should thus not reduce his poetry to a new, albeit theoretically sophisticated myth.

3) Classroom activities - Larkin's stylistics and technique: Attempt to track the common characteristics of all the poems and speculate on how Larkins style expresses the themes and ideas of the poems. There is often convergence between form and meaning. 3.1) What diction does Larkin employ? What moods are created by his choice of words, his choice of subject matter, the identity of the narrators in his poems? How does mood relate to subject matter and to theme in Larkin's poetry? 3.2) Can one presume that there is a single, common voice in all Larkin's poems? Would it be right to identify the speaker in each poem with Larkin the person? In which poems are there signs that the identity of the speaker is part of the poetic package? How is the character of the speaker different to that of the protagonist(s) in the poems? How do the values of 'speaker' and 'characters' differ? 3.3) What role does irony play in Larkin's poetry? When is Larkin merely observing matters from a distance, and when is he actively pointing out the inconsistencies in the scenarios he is describing? When is the poetic voice detached from events and when is the poetic narrator involved with the events described? 3.4) How does irony as a poetic technique link in with the themes of Larkin's poetry? How is Larkin's use of irony linked to the social position of the narrators in his poems, and how does Larkin make his readers aware of the discrepancies in the situations he describes? (Irony can broadly be described as a deliberate poetic awareness of a significant discrepancy between how things are viewed and how things are, or a significant discrepancy between how things are described and how things are actually shown to be.) 3.5) In what way are Larkin's poems like mini short stories? How does Larkin use people, places, objects and events in creating a scenario in a poem? 3.6) In what way are Larkin's poems dramatic - offering a set of characters on a stage? 3.7) Why are Larkin's poems matter of fact rather than lyrical or metaphorical? Are there any significant moments of lyricism or symbolism in Larkin's poems?

4) Classroom activities - Social context: 4.1) Look at how social structures and the worldview of Larkin's time are reflected in the images, locations, characters and events of all his poems. What is Larkin's disposition to individual and communal suffering and to the disruption of social order and individual normality? 4.2) Track the differences between pre- and post-war England, both in terms of the First and Second World Wars. How is this 'big' picture reflected in the world of Larkin's minor characters. How is a character's social position and economic circumstances reflected in their disposition to life and its meaning? 5) Classroom activities: Creative Assignments. 5.1) Dramatise one of the poetic situations: Employ dialogue and notes on setting and situation to induce a particular mood. You might use a narrator along with a number of central characters. 5.2) Write a short story based on one of the poems. Focus on the distinction between what the characters know and think, and what the narrator knows and thinks. 5.3) Write a poem on a contemporary situation in Larkin's style. Use ordinary diction and describe an ordinary situation while picking up on what seems uncomfortable, strange and incongruous about the situation. Follow the triptych structure discussed in section 2.2. 6) Classroom activities: Views, Values; Text, Society. 6.1) What references, images and words in the poems point to the English social context of Larkin's time in each of the poems? 6.2) Is Larkins so-called secularism an active attack on religious ideas or just a reflection of the common views of his time? 6.3) How does Larkins social commentary come across in his poems? Would you say one can find a consistent position on social questions in his poetry or are a number of viewpoints present in his poems? 6.4) Identify the remnants of more traditional poetic techniques in Larkins poems. What poetic aspects are absent from his poems and what aspects are present? What kinds of people does Larkin observe? What are his characters doing?

6.5) Look at Larkin's portrayal of women. Does Larkin objectify these women or do they have a voice in his poetry? Does he offer a sympathetic, condescending, adoring, romantic or prosaic view of these characters? What images and situations are these women associated with? Are these women presented unilaterally from a distinctly male gaze, or is their presentation more individualised? Why would readers choose to attribute the views of the voices in the poems to Larkin himself, and how would this choice affect their interpretation of the poems? 6.6) How does Larkin deal with the questions of life's deeper meaning? How does he talk about death and about love in particular? How do his characters respond to situations where their lives are disrupted by an awareness of death or suffering? How is the response of the 'narrator' in the poems different or similar to that of the 'characters' in this respect? 7) Classroom activities - Theory and Interpretation: 7.1) Some would say that Larkin's poetry is Marxist in nature in that it critically examines the social condition of his time, with ordinary, struggling men and women as his subjects. Given that Larkin appears to be critical of master-narratives such as a religious interpretation of life, could one say that he offers us socially realistic poetry? 7.2) Is it necessarily true that Larkin denigrates women, or does Larkin merely offer us a realistic picture of British society at the time? Could one accuse Larkin of misogyny given that he is critical of the traditional discourse of love and marriage? 7.3) Many of Larkins poems are open-ended in interpretation rather than offering a single master narrative. They are also critical of modernist society, showing us where traditional values fall short. Could one claim that Larkin is one of the first post-modernists, giving us questions and critique rather than fixed sets of meanings? 8) Internet Resources: { HYPERLINK "http://www.philiplarkin.com/links.htm" } { HYPERLINK "http://www.coventry.org.uk/heritage/people/larkin/" } { HYPERLINK "http://www.sogang.ac.kr/~anthony/Larkin.htm" } { HYPERLINK "http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENG-erm/links.htm" } { HYPERLINK "http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17145" } { HYPERLINK "http://arts.abc.net.au/headspace/rn/booksw/amis/larkin.htm" }