Philip Larkin’s Poetry: Themes, Form, Style, Imagery and Symbolism
the French symbolist poetry (1980, 237), Regan clarifies that we could consider him a
poet antisymbolist who makes a use ironic of the ideas and symbolist techniques (1991,
34). In fact, one of his first poems, “Femmes Damnées” (1943), is an adaptation sui
generis of the “Femmes Damnées” of Baudelaire, whereas Hartley (1988, 135) finds in
“If, My Darling” an echo of “Spleen” of Baudelaire.
Ana Balakian defines the baudeleriano symbolism as “to refinement of the art of
ambiguity to express the indeterminate in human sensibilities and in the natural
phenomena” (1993, 1256), and certainly, at some moments Larkin it approaches the
undetermined thing: in that last strophe of “High Windows” or in the end of “Here”; in
those “warp tight-shut” (T316: 38) or in those “sand-clouds, thick and close” (T316: 42)
annaabi.ee 
