Postmodern/Contemporary British Literature Philip Larkin

Larkin's early work shows the influence of Yeats, but his later poetic identity was influenced mainly by Thomas Hardy. He is well-known for his use of slang and coarse language in his poetry, partly balanced by a similarly antique word choice. With fine use of enjambement and rhyme, his poetry is highly structured, but never rigid. Death was a recurring theme and subject of his poetry, Aubade being an example of this. The Less Deceived, published in 1955, marked Larkin as an up-and-coming poet. He was for a time associated with The Movement. 1964's The Whitsun Weddings confirmed his reputation. The title poem is a masterly depiction of the sights seen by the poet from a train one Whitsun; though this description does the poem little justice. In 1972 he wrote the oft-quoted "Going, Going", a poem which reveals his increasing streak of romantic fatalism in his view of England in his later years – prophesising a complete destruction of the countryside and of a certain idealised idea of national togetherness and identity, it ends with the doom-laden statement "I just think it will happen, soon". High Windows, his last book, was released in 1974; for some critics it represents a falling-off from his previous two books into acrid self-parody; yet it contains a number of his most-loved pieces, including "This Be The Verse" and "The Explosion", as well as the title poem.

Besides poetry, Larkin published two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and several essays. Larkin was also a major contributor to the re-evaluation of the poetry of Thomas Hardy, which had been ignored in comparison to his work as a novelist. Hardy received the longest selection in Larkin's idiosyncratic and controversial anthology, The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973). Larkin was by contrast a notable critic of modernism in contemporary art and literature; his skepticism is at its most nuanced and illuminating in Required Writing, a collection of his book-reviews and essays; it is at its most enflamed and polemical in his introduction to his collected jazz reviews, All What Jazz.

“Here”

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows And traffic all night north; swerving through fields Too thin and thistled to be called meadows, And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants, And the widening river's slow presence, The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town: Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water, And residents from raw estates, brought down The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys, Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires - Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies, Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling Where only salesmen and relations come Within a terminate and fishy-smelling Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum, Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives; And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges, Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Denise Levertov

John Fowles

Kingsley Amis