Philip Larkin
1) His Biography and Main Works:
Sydney Larkin and Eva Larkin welcomed Philip Larkin into the world on August 9th, 1992 in Coventry. He was the family’s lone son. From 1922 through 1944, his father served as the city treasurer. Philip Larkin attended the King Henry VIII School in the City from 1930 to 1940. He frequently contributed writing to The Coventarian, the school journal. During his senior year of high school, he also served as magazine editor.
He left school and enrolled in St. John College in Oxford. He persevered without stop to finish his degree even as the battle raged. He had failed his army medical exam due to bad eyesight. He earned a First Class Honors degree in English in 1943. His debut poem, “Ultimatum,” appeared in the national weekly Listener on November 28, 1940. He released three poems in Oxford Poetry in 1943. “Mythological Introduction,” “A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb,” and “I Dreamed of an Out-Thrust Arm of Land” were the titles of these three poems.
After graduating, Larkin briefly resided with his parents. He accepted a position as a librarian at Wellington, Shropshire, in November 1943. He continued to write and publish while pursuing his goal of becoming a professional librarian. He released ten poems in Oxford in 1945 while the country was at war. Later, he included these poems in his book, The North Ship. Two novels, Jill in 1946 and A Girl in Winter in 1947, were published after the anthology.
Larkin was hired as an assistant librarian at the University College of Leicester in 1946. After finishing his professional studies, he was admitted as an Associate of the Library Association in 1949. In 1950, he was hired as a sub-librarian at Queen’s University in Belfast. In Belfast, his poetic endeavours were reinforced. His poetry has appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies. The Marvell Press released his book The Less Deceived. Larkin was hired as the University of Hull’s librarian on March 21st, 1955.
His collection, The Less Deceived, was released that same year in October. His reputation as the greatest poet and literary figure of the 20th century was built on this anthology. He released The Whitsun Weddings, another compilation, in 1964. This compilation earned positive reviews and was well-liked. Larkin received the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry in 1965. Larkin contributed to the Daily Telegraph’s monthly assessments of jazz and recordings from 1961 to 1971.
He released his final book, High Windows, in 1974. He was officially recognised as one of the greatest poets in English history by the collection. His final major poem, “Aubade,” appeared in The Times Literary Supplements in December 1977. Larkin would have established himself in English poetry even if he had simply produced this poem. A collection of his reviews and articles was released in 1983 under the title Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982. In 1984, the anthology received a W.H. Smith Literary Award. Along with this, he had previously won other poetry awards. He received the CBE in 1975 and the German Shakespeare-Pries in 1976.
He got a D.Litt. from Oxford University in 1984. He was also elected to the British Library Board. Larkin was offered the job of Poet Laureate upon the passing of Sir John Betjeman in 1984, but he turned it down due to the position’s potential for more public exposure.
2) Main Themes:
Religion:
The most obvious and pervasive theme in his poetry is religion. Larkin wrote his poems while contemplating his character, as well as his personal beliefs towards life, religion, and religious dogma. In one of his poems, “Church Going,” he realistically expresses his views on religion, God, and the current state of religious beliefs among various social classes. His poem “Church Going” tells the story of that period, when people had started to doubt the presence of God and organised religion. From the poem’s very first line, “Once I am sure there’s nothing going on,” it is clear that Larkin is using sarcasm.
Anyone who has been to a small parish church in Britain would be familiar with the description of the church. With a central aisle bordered by wooden pews with padded kneelers and prayer books arranged on small shelves on the backs of the pews, the layout is typical of the architecture found in the Church of England.
The sanctuary is located at the east end of the church, separated from the remainder by an altar rail. A pulpit, a lectern, and a sizable altar or communion table may be seen behind the altar rail on the left and right respectively. Large Bibles are typically kept open for the sermon and lectern readings of the day. Even though the narrator is not a practising Christian, he mounts the lectern and reads the lesson, concluding with the lines “Here endeth the lesson,” which are not found in the Bible itself and may have been recalled from memory, just as a lay reader might in a church service.
He then assumes his nonreligious tourist image once more, contributing a sixpence and signing the visitor book. By realising that the value of churches and religion lies in what he refers to as their seriousness—or in their long tradition of being a place concerned with the great and meaningful issues of life and death, as opposed to the ordinary and every day—the narrator is able to resolve this contradiction.
Melancholy:
Melancholy is defined as “a deep melancholy that lasts for a long time and is often hard to explain.” His subjects are all embraced by melancholy. Additionally, this is the overarching idea of his poems. He has an unquenchable negative mentality. He is referred to as having “the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket” by Erice Homeberger in “The Art of the Real”.
In his poem “Ambulances,” Larkin adopts a gloomy viewpoint and infuses it with a sad and melancholic tone. The line “And since the solving emptiness / That lays just under all we do” captures the hollowness and emptiness of a modern man who has no time to demonstrate compassion and concern for a sick guy. Modern man lacks empathy; he offers the sick guy only platitudes rather than any real solutions.
The Element of Chaos:
Chaos, defined as “a state of utter disarray and lack of order,” and Destruction are different elements in Larkin’s poetry, as demonstrated in his poem MCMXIV (1914). It sheds light on the poet’s perception of the post-World War II era. Larkin is unable to recover from the atrocities of combat. His poetry is centred on the destructive and disorganised results of war. He carefully examines the disorganised social, political, economic, and religious systems. He talks about the chaotic conditions that led individuals to be compelled to move to communities in search of shelter. Larkin laments the lost generation while criticising the war mania.
Nihilism:
Nihilism, defined as a philosophical doctrine that suggests the lack of belief in one or more reputedly meaningful aspects of life, and pessimism, defined as a state of mind in which one anticipates undesirable outcomes or believes that the evil or hardships in life outweigh the good or luxuries, are both depicted in his poem “Church Going.” According to Andrew Motion, Larkin has frequently been viewed as a gloomy, unyielding pessimist.
Church Going discusses modern agnosticism. The poem’s narrator has strong doubts about religion. The question facing Larkin is not whether or not to believe in God, but rather what a man may replace with God. Even though the “Church” is a representation of faith, harmony, and purity, people no longer have faith in it in the modern world. Who will be the very last person to look for this spot for what it once was, he asks. In addition, he asks, “Shall we avoid them as poor luck places? In terms of nihilism, Larkin discusses the negation of life and expresses his disgust with contemporary civilisation.
3) His Legacy:
The 1992 release of Anthony Thwaite’s compilation of Larkin’s letters and Andrew Motion’s official biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, both had a significant negative impact on his posthumous reputation. These exposed his racism, pornographic addiction, developing right-wing political inclination, and his penchant for venomous outbursts. Even before these two novels were released in 1990, Tom Paulin stated that Larkin’s obscenity was motivated by preconceptions that were not even close to being as usual, accepted, or everyday as the lyrical language in which they were so blatantly expressed.
The letters and Motion’s biography fueled more evaluations of this nature, such as Lisa Jardine’s statement in The Guardian that Larkin’s poetry bears a baggage of attitudes that the Selected Letters now make clear due to the Britishness of Larkin’s poetry. The novelist Martin Amis, on the other hand, disregarded the disclosures in his book The War Against Cliché, contending that the letters in particular reveal little more than Larkin’s propensity to modify his language depending on the audience.
Richard Bradford presented a comparable defence in his 2005 biography of Larkin. According to Graeme Richardson, who reviewed Letters to Monica (2010), the book went some way towards the repair of Larkin’s ruined reputation by presenting Larkin as not exactly the evil, black-hearted near-rapist everyone believed.
Larkin is still one of the most well-liked poets in Britain despite controversy surrounding his personal life and political views. in 2003 Larkin was declared “the nation’s best-loved poet” in a survey conducted by the Poetry Book Society nearly two decades after his passing. In 2008, The Times called Larkin “the greatest British post-war writer.”
Three of his poems—”This Be The Verse,” “The Whitsun Weddings,” and “An Arundel Tomb”—were included in the 1995 list of the nation’s top 100 poems as chosen by Bookworm viewers on the BBC. In the twenty-first century, Larkin has drawn more attention from the media. One of the accessible poetry texts for the AQA English Literature A Level syllabus is Larkin’s book The Whitsun Weddings, whereas the OCR board offers High Windows. In 2010, Hull buses featured excerpts from his poetry.
