Philip Larkin Context

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  • 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
    • 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

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