Philip Larkin Context
- Created by: G-Ham
- Created on: 11-12-20 12:45
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- Philip Larkin Context
- Early life
- born in Coventry, England
- born in 1922
- went to Uni at Oxford, graduated with a first in English
- undertook professional studies to become a librarian after uni
- worked in libraries his entire life
- Larkin remembered his early years as unspent and boring
- poor eyesight and stuttering plagued Larkin and a youth so he retreated into solitude and read poetry every night
- Later life
- he finally worked as a librarian in Hull
- one of England's most famous post-war poets
- commonly referred to as England's "other poet laureate"
- many critics favoured Larkin's appointment but he turned it down because he preferred to stay out of the limelight
- Larkin shied from publicity, rarely consented to interviews, cultivated his image as right wing curmudgeon and grew depressed at his fame
- England was Larkin's emotional territory to an eccentric degree
- he distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature
- His poetry
- he employed the traditional tools of poetry - rhyme, stanza and meter
- Larkin avoided the literary, metropolitan, the group label, and embraced the nonliterary, the provincial...
- he used these tools to explore the often uncomfortable or terrifying experiences thrust upon people in the modern age
- from Hull, he composed poetry that both reflected the dreariness of postwar England and voiced the spiritual despair of the modern age
- he employed the traditional tools of poetry - rhyme, stanza and meter
- In The Whitsun Weddings:
- themes include - Religion: Faith Healing, Water and An Arundel Tomb
- Social chaos through love and sex: Sunny Prestatyn and Wild Oats
- the melancholy: Ambulances and As Bad As A Mile
- the pessimism in isolation: Mr Bleaney, Talking in Bed
- realism and alienation with the passing of time: Here, Toads Revisited and The Whitsun Weddings
- themes include - Religion: Faith Healing, Water and An Arundel Tomb
- Early life
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