Philip Larkin’s Poetry: Themes, Form, Style, Imagery and Symbolism (0)

Philip Larkin ’s Poetry : Themes, Form, Style, Imagery and Symbolism
Author : Sandra Olivares González
Tutor: Jesús Marín Calvarro
Degree in English Studies , English Department, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters , University of Extremadura
Cáceres, 29th January 2016
Philip Larkin’s Poetry: Themes, Form, Style, Imagery and Symbolism
The aim of this work is to obtain some characteristics of the poetry of Philip Larkin, such us the origin of his themes, the way in which he writes his poems and the symbolism he uses (which is a very controversial topic because some assume that he does use it, while some others say that he uses it in an ironic way). In this work we tried to make a revision on the vision of Larkin through the studies that had been made on him, and on the basis of it we can say, that the voice of Larkin still clearly contemporary today. He is, in addition, acid, disagreeable, unpleasant, and we can catalogue these characteristics like the most appreciated by its followers.
Larkin gives us through his poetry, a vision of middle-aged conservative, that in a politically incorrect way in our days, does not stand children, detests the life in family, he does not believe in anything and he does not wait anything of the life. He scorns the “literary life” and also the things that normally soften everybody: the romantic love, the memories of the childhood, the nature, etc.
Keywords: Larkin, poetry, cruelty, suffering, nature
Index
Introduction 4
1. Chapter I 5
1.1. Larkin Studies Points of View: Biography and Poetry 5
1.2. Larkin Stylistic Map 8
2. Chapter II 11
2.1 Expressing Himself 11
3. Conclussion 15
4. References 16
INTRODUCTION
Philip Larkin is one of the most important English poets of the new Era, due to the interest of he owns, more and more readers get to know about the two Philip Larkin’s the man and the poet . Since the publication of the three most widely used sources (the Collected Poems in 1988, the Selected Letters in 1992, and Andrew Motion’s authorized biography in 1993) numerous further books, essays and articles have contributed to Larkin studies.
These include publications of Larkin’s texts (such as Further Requirements in 2001, Trouble at Willow Gables in 2002, and Early Poems and Juvenilia in 2005), personal recollections (for instance, Maeve Brennan’s The Philip Larkin I Knew in 2002), another biography ( Richard Bradford’s First Boredom, Then Fear in 2005), and critical studies (the latest being M. W. Rowe’s Philip Larkin: Art and Self in 2011). A. T. Trolley’s Larkin at Work (1997) offers an insight into the genesis of a number of major poems and Larkin’s method of composition. Shorter essays add further aspects to the discussion of Larkin. To mention a few examples: Oliver James has approached “This Be The Verse ” from a genetician’s point of view, Richard T. Cauldwell has analysed Larkin’s recorded readings phonetically, and David Punter has applied Melanie Klein’s psychoanalysis to his poems.
My aim with this paper is to make an academic review about the principles of his poetics manifest in his short essays, interviews, reviews, letters, and the poems themselves. My main interest will be to analyse the themes, form, style, imagery and symbolism, from the point of view of the numerous studies his being protagonist.
Larkin was not one of the major essay writers in the history of British literature. He never wrote a text comparable with Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” or Eliot ’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent ”. This lack of a conceptualized theory, however, does not indicate a lack of principles. In the first part of this study I will offer an outline of Larkin’s poetics, based on the form and the style he used to use, to get in to a second part in which I will assess the way he presents and expresses his ideas.
CHAPTER I

LARKIN STUDIES POINTS OF VIEW: BIOGRAPHY AND POETRY
In the collection of essays edited by Stephen Regan (Philip Larkin, 1997) we can find some underlying question as: are we discussing the poem or the poet? Or, in Larkin’s terms: are we more deceived or less deceived by the metonymy of the phrase “we are reading Larkin”? The main purpose of the volume may be discussing and assessing Larkin’s poetry, but there are at least as many references to his letters (mainly published in SL) and to his life as to the poems themselves.
If we think that Larkin is known as a legend we shouldn’t be surprised about the importance his life takes as a part of his work. His work, balancing on the borderline between “Life” and “Art”, will probably always is interesting not only for critics, but also for a wider reading public.
There is every chance that this interest will be further increased by the publication of Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones in 2010. The private letters draw one’s attention not merely to the poet’s life, but also to the romantic aspect of his personality: the author who first builds up his life, then projects it into poetry.
Although I will keep references to Larkin’s life in this study to a minimum, I am not suggesting that the biography must by definition be outside the scope of Larkin criticism. Discussing Larkin’s life is justifiable, since it helps us understand his poems, although in many cases it has also proven to be distorting or misleading. It is revealing that even those authors who overtly reject the methods of biographical criticism, such as John Osborne in Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence in 2008, make use of the biography, at least to a certain extent.
In the centre of the book edited by Regan one finds a hilariously subversive essay: Graham Holderness’s “Reading ‘Deceptions’”, a text balanced on the borderline between literary criticism and fiction. It offers four readings of Larkin’s “Deceptions” by four fictitious characters in the same university department: a formalist, a Marxist, a feminist and a post-structuralist critic . Holderness’s parodistic readings have a central position in the volume for precisely the same reason as Larkin’s “Posterity” does in High Windows .
In the first place , the poem entitles the reader to see Larkin through the eyes of Jake Balokowsky, his fictitious biographer, but Larkin also ridicules this young cosmopolitan scholar. Holderness’s Cleanth, Raymond, Kate, and Colin are both serious and ludicrous. Holderness has created four possible scholars, and he does not say that any of them are wrong.
He laughs at them, but does not reject their readings. In a Larkinesque manner, he wears the masks of four critics to demonstrate the diversity of Larkin criticism.
In an earlier monograph (Philip Larkin, 1992), Regan outlines the main trends of Larkin criticism. In so doing, he identifies a watershed: “After 1974, when High Windows was publicated, the critical response to Larkin’s poetry shifted drastically; Larkin came to be seen as a much more provocative, disquieting and ‘difficult’ writer than previously, and critics began to perceive in his work the impact of European modernism and symbolism”. It is highly suggestive that in the collection Regan edited five years later, Andrew Motion’s essay (previously entitled “The Poems” in his critical study on Larkin) is renamed as “Philip Larkin and Symbolism”.
In the same book, Seamus Heaney also points out that “there is something Yeatsian in the way that Larkin, in High Windows, places his sun poem immediately opposite and in answer to his moon poem”. In Barbara Everett’s study (“Philip Larkin: After Symbolism”) one finds ample evidence for the influence of French symbolism upon Larkin. This is particularly important since Larkin denied being in any way influenced by what came from abroad. Today we have every reason to see this as a legend that he created about himself.
The most significant point made by the two books by Regan is that whether one accepts the image of “provincial Larkin” or that of “modernist (even postmodernist) Larkin”, it is equally significant to make a distinction between the poet and the persona in his poems.
He argues, furthermore, that a linguistic or stylistic approach is much more fruitful in the analysis of poetry in general, and Larkin’s poems in particular, than a thematic one. Regan quotes some authors who maintain the view that Larkin’s stylistic effects are based upon a combination of metaphoric (literary) and metonymic (colloquial) language . He, however, can fully accept the method based upon this stylistic distinction only if it analyses poetry in the context of the society in which it was written.
Similarly, Regan acknowledges the achievements of what he calls the “symbolist approach”, since it points out the link between Larkin and (both French and English) symbolism.
Again, however, he sees it as problematic that this approach tends to view literary trends outside their social context. Instead of the rejected methods, his ambition in the second part of his monograph is to offer “a more responsive and responsible historicist criticism”.
Regan does this by pointing out that “ here is a complex and distinctive relationship between the linguistic structure of the poems and the changing social structure of the post-war years”. Nobody can doubt this, but Regan’s conclusion is somewhat surprising: he makes Larkin, a par excellence conservative poet, seem to be a rebellious critic of post-war capitalism. Moreover, although Regan admits that Larkin is not a “realistic” poet, he very nearly makes him a Marxist writer by emphasizing his solidarity with the working class , which, according to him, is obviously present in Larkin’s verse.
Political readings of Larkin are significant, but they should not elbow aside other , equally relevant, approaches. When Andrew McKeown and Charles Holdefer called for papers to be given at a conference entitled “Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance” in 2004, the result was unexpected. The term resistance, recalling political contexts, was reinterpreted in a number of ways by the participants. After the papers had been published with the same title (2006), Graham Chesters wrote in a review:
“What strikes one is the diversity of what resists or is being resisted. Larkin is claimed, for example, to resist translation, foreign languages in general, specific developments in English poetry, the academic prerequisites of poetry, time, the world, mass civilization, loss of traditional respect for rhyme, modernity, the War, conservative ideals with respect to sexual and social politics, unjust treatment, traditional modes of understanding, hostile attitudes towards the enemy, commercialization, aggressive and demeaning self-interest characteristic of the final decades of the twentieth century, Modernist fragmentation, the language of public discourse, and inarticulate middle-class prosperity”.
In my reading, this gives evidence of Larkin’s strong “resistance” to restricting the meanings of his poems. Political readings are always possible, but they are not always interesting and stimulating.
Although Regan’s monograph has generated debates, his emphasis on “the fundamental assumption that writing and reading take place in history” and that the “horizon of possible meanings is determined by the conjuncture of two historical moments, the moment of writing and the moment of reading”, can surely be accepted. Another monograph applying the method of historicism, published fourteen years after Regan’s is Stephen Cooper’s Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer (2004).

LARKIN STYLISTIC MAP
When approaching the poems of Larkin as if were compressed stories, John Bayley emphasizes his value of epiphanies. When describes (referring to territory of poem anecdotal that is almost story) about what entirely consists his “new way of exploring that territory” (1988, 272), Bayley does not do more than reform the poetic text definition that we have handled in the present work - a text in which the information highly is concentrated and organized in the following terms:
“I have you use the shorthand of poetry to block in a situation in a way that prose would have to do much dwells laboriously, and AT to much to greater length” (1988, 272). It is as if the text, when concentrating itself, aspired to the luminous outbreak that is epiphanies: “to moment that is unique, drawing to together of event and experience into to singular impression which art dog to render whole” (Bayley 1988, 274).
These epiphanies are, therefore, the revelation of which only the poet has seen, or the re-revelation of something already known on which it tries to throw a new light. Perhaps what it distinguishes the art of Larkin is not as much the aspiration to reveal a truth as projecting it as an epiphany.
In all his work Larkin do not stop in bars at the time of attracting the reader with all the arms which he has: its histrionics, its humour, its acidity, its self-confidence, his swears words , his compassion:
Larkin recognizes that this aspect is one of which they make his poetry recognizable: “If someone asked me what lines I am known for it would be the one about mum or dad or ‘Books are a load of crap’ – sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo, as Dr Johnson said”. (1983, 48)
He is able to mount a great verbal spectacle of its sadness, its depression, its deception, its frustration, something that Bayley express perfectly when he says in his book that “the marvellously discreet element of showmanship in Larkin’s best poems depends on the combination of a set-up story with the poet’s own attitudes and tone of voice, the two engaging in a subtle rivalry with each other.”
The voice tone is very important in Larkin’s poetry, because almost all his poems have a deliberate orality that ends up conforming, because we have seen in commented poems, the same structure of text. Peter Levi said that he had never heard Larkin read his own poems, but the voice in them is so perfectly conveyed that one knows exactly how they should go.
In order to arrive at his own truths, Larkin locates itself in the perspective of the reader, of the man (more or less) current, and he shows all the way to him as if this (with more or less effort) also could cross it.
Suddenly he appears, with his voice unmistakable, and narrates us all the experience that ends at the epiphanies, the revelations, and epigrams. As Booth says:
Larkin presents himself in his poems as “a vivid and actual being who is the reverse of the ‘Invisible Poet’ (Kenner’s phrase for Eliot) invented by Modernism’s quest for impersonality” (Everett 1988, 140). He is a highly “visible” poet, who seems to have no inhibition about addressing the reader in his own candid, natural tone. (1992, 6)
When Larkin publishes his first book, The North Ship, has only passed two from the appearance of the Four Quartets of Eliot, that maybe can explain that they must pass ten years more until the first book sees the light, in 1955 The Less Deceived,
Of its previous published book, The North Ship, Larkin would affirm later “it was very young, born of reading Yeats and so on (...) It’s not very good, though your courtesy will prevent you from agreeing (...) There are some pieces I hate very much indeed”. (2001, 50)
He finds himself in a time in which the poetry seems to move towards a model that Lodge himself characterizes like “anti-modernist, readily and realistic” (1989, 119). In its beginnings, Larkin, along with Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Thom Gunn, D. J. Enright, John Holloway, Donald Davie and Elizabeth Jennings, constitute the poetic group that would denominate The Movement, and that appeared in society in 1956 with a titled anthology.
If we make case to the interview that John Haffenden does to Larkin in 1981, there is no doubt that he admired Eliot (Larkin 2001, 52), although at two concrete moments he distancing radically of him:
When Larkin mentions that life and work always go united (2001, 49), and when he affirms sharply that poems don’t come from other poems, they come from being oneself in life. Every man is an island , entire of himself, as Donne said” (2001, 54).
This distancing don’t have to be consider an “anxiety of the influence” of the poetry of Eliot (that, in fact, resemble nothing like the one of Larkin), but like a rupture with the world of the modernism, that Terry Whalen characterizes as “to landscape of the mind in which makes specific metaphors, images and action and spiritual symbols signifiers of a complex state of internality” (1986, 95), and like the grubbing of that new territory mentioned by Bayley, a territory that Esteban Pujals describes with detail:
“The poetry of Larkin constitutes the most current context of the life. Thus, if the references to the old world, with their Biblical and classic thematic, seem to him irrelevant and dead for man of today, the poetry that he thinks that he must conscientiously write is the one that is related to the daily experiences, expressed in the prosaic objectivity that demands its realism ”. (1973, 177)
2. CHAPTER II:
2.1. EXPRESSING HIMSELF
Brownjohn remember us that one of the praised qualities more after the publication of The Whitsun Weddings was “The captivating accuracy with which there am catches the physical feel of life in England in our Time” (1975, 13). One of the mechanisms that Larkin uses to catch the reader is the presence of daily objects, is which Larkin denominates “the furniture of our lives” (1983, 211) 102.
Bruce K. Martin affects this rooting of the poetry of Larkin in his time when affirming: “Taken together, his poems afford a remarkable panorama of British life at mid-century, particularly as it has been lived in the towns of the North and Midlands”. (1989, 144).
Between the famous works: “Awful Foot” (T315, 22) of “Dockery and is”; “That bases” (119, 10) of “Home is Under Sad”; or those telephones that “crouch” (T333, 45) in “Aubade”. That is to say, that for Larkin, if the poetry must be originated in the experience, nothing can be left outside. Both mention that there is a process that he characterizes as: “the prosaic phrases guarantee the more elevated and ‘poetic’ elements, rooting them in commonplace reality” (1992, 89)103.
As Raine says, “Larkin censored nothing on the grounds about what it was considered unpoetic, he was resigned to swallowing everything'” (Raine, 1986, 37). And Larkin himself would affirm: “Nowadays nobody believes in `poetic' subjects any dwells than they believe in poetic diction” (1983, 83). For him a process takes place that characterizes this means: “the prosaic phrases guarantee the dwells elevated and ‘poetic’ elements, rooting them in commonplace reality” (1992, 89) 103.
And Whalen, talking about to Larkin and Lawrence, affirms that “poets of epiphany and beholding empirical observation, both participate in the twentieth-century inclination toward to poetry of concreteness and attentiveness to the details of the world” (1986, 93). Everett sees in Larkin a certain insolent or thug vein originated, partly, by certain practice of “shocking the bourgeois, but in special reversed form: needling the aesthetic to the reader” (1989, 129).
In the case of Larkin, the translator will avoid that tendency so in rows inclined to “poetize” the poetry translations, regarding who their author could be, and will consider the eagerness of Larkin about, in words of Everett, creating “an unobtrusive art”, that never has to be confused with “artlessness” (1989, 132).
We found in Larkin a peculiar mixture of fluid orality and very noticeable structure, whose maximum examples would be “Here” and “High Windows”, Brownjohn says that:
Larkin has never written easily (...) But any sense of effort or contrivance is utterly absent: the diction of the poems, the beautifully judged selection of imagery, fit into frameworks which support and enhance them with immense metrical skill. (1975, 25)
Here there is another one of the great challenges that consider Larkin in their writing: idiolect that creates and that it is put under that fiction of fluid phrase, of poetic voice (and never rather) that drags us in to his steps, although never without drawing up an clear structure, that can reach the exquisite subtlety of “As Bad as to Mile” or “Wires” or sustain architectures cathedrals as in “The Old Fools” or “Dockery and Son”.
It is what allows Booth to affirm that “No poet between Byron and Larkin achieves anything like this spontaneously personal ease of idiom, and very few poets aim at it” (1992, 87). To the time that he does not left to observe that “its carefully concealed formal regularity gives it an aesthetic completeness which is sensed rather than consciously heard” (1992, 88).
As we have commented before Larkin uses all his ruses to catch the reader, that sensation of long phrase and metric regularity creates a space where the voice takes us to his experience, but without threats in regard on clearness. For the translator is one of the more important structural markers, because is the one that sustains the framework of the poem.
At the time of obtaining that effect of “narrative” in his poems, Larkin uses two very characteristic resources: the poetic enjambment and the two dashes. In one it interviews with Larkin we read the following dialogue:
How important is enjambment for you? In certain lines, you seem to isolate lives by the very line break...
No device is important in itself. Writing poetry is playing off the natural rhythms and word-order of speech against the artificialities of rhyme and meter. One has a few private rules: never split an adjective and its noun, for instance. (1983, 71).
But in spite of his words, and since we have seen when analysing its poems, if there is an enjambment poetry, that one would be Larkin’s one. Brogan and Scott perfectly define the effect of the enjambment when affirming that:
“In reading, the non-coincidence of the frames of syntax and meter in enjambment has the effect of giving the reader “mixed messages”: the closure of the metrical pattern at line-end implies a stop (pause), no matter how infinitesimal, while the obvious incompletion of the syntactic period says, go on. The one scissors the other. These conflicting signals, in heightening readily tension, also thereby heighten awareness, so that in fact one is made more aware of the word at line-end than its predecessors”. (1993, 359).
It is a resource whose “tension” ends directly at the result before mentioned: that mixture of fluid orality and rigid strophic structure, that does that, for example, the reader almost can read of a pull the first phrase of nine verses of “High Windows” or the twenty -five verses that there are before the first point in “Here”. The reader is caught in the “speed” of the poem, to which also contributes to the narrative use of both points. There are two resources that become structural markers in all poems, something that there is to very consider in the translation.
Some authors have discussed if a symbolist poet could consider itself to Larkin, and although Barbara Everett affirms that she uses some of the ideas and techniques of 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) of “Dockery and Are”; or in that “peak that stays in view to wherever the go” (T284: 43) of “The Old Fools”. There is certain attempt here to express the uncertain, what one resists to the words, as if outside something that names for the first time. Booth defines this sudden appearance of the symbolic element when affirming, in its analysis of “Ambulances”, that:
“On the one hand the prosaic phrases guarantee the more elevated and ‘poetic’ elements, rooting them in commonplace reality. But more interestingly, since the reader remains unsure as to the poems register, many words and phrases gather added significance”. (1992,89)
These stylistic characteristics that we have enumerated are those that, they taking shape in the poem, we identified them as “structural marks”. But there are not the only one characteristics of this author, since enumerate all of them it would escape to the dimensions delimited by the work, we just try to make an outline of his style, his form and way to do, because the style of an author is like its thought: we can do an abstract idea of him, but we only can express it in words and concrete details. The structural markers are the accomplishment in each poem of the stylistic characteristics of the author, in addition to other resources, own and exclusive of that “freshly created universe” that the poem is, that they can use to give enhancement to those characteristics are a way to express their speech, that is to say, the thought of the made specific in words.
CONCLUSSION
In order to understand the importance of Philip Larkin we have to locate him in its time within the British poetry that usually counts enough in the succession of the generations. The generation of the beginnings of the century, the Ezra Pound and Eliot, happen those to them of the Thirties, with Auden, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, a generation who’s jeopardizes on social fights, Larkin appears at a time of changes, a difficult time in the cultural scene of the time, appears like a poet who adjusts like a glove to that to go against of the rhetoric of the previous generations trying to cause a radical change in the settled down customs.
In this work we tried to make a revision on the vision of Larkin through the studies that had been made on him, and on the basis of it we can say, that the voice of Larkin still clearly contemporary today. He is, in addition, acid, disagreeable, unpleasant, and we can catalogue these characteristics like the most appreciated by its followers.
There have been cruel poets, great satirists, it is certain, and there are full poems of disappointment or even of hatred at all the times, but, generally, the voice of the poet is the one transude of melancholy that transmits transcendental words and visions.
Not therefore the one of Larkin, Larkin transfers us, by means of his poetry, a vision of middle-aged conservative, that in a politically incorrect way in our days, does not stand children, detests the life in family, or be in a couple, he does not believe in anything and he does not wait anything of the life.
His acid tone, bitter and slightly sardonic vision of the life that he displays to us in his work is a reality slap. He scorns the “literary life” and also the things that normally soften everybody: the romantic love, the memories of the childhood, the nature, etc.
Surprises the expanded of a the controversy that continues dividing the waters between those who admire it and who detracting it, often protected by the divergent readings that are made about his work, even so it is undeniable that we are in front of one of the maximum poetic referents of our era, that it has reached to millions of people without pretentions, nor trimmings whose direct language identification foul language work continues surprising today and whose declining vision and displeases demanded changes is a vision with which we can still felt identified nowadays.
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