philip larkin (1922-1985). born in coventry and educated at oxford. he became a distinguished jazz...

Philip Larkin(1922-1985)

• Born in Coventry and educated at Oxford.

• He became a distinguished jazz critic and journalist.

• He worked as a librarian in provincial towns.

• He was the greatest of the Movement poets.

His Life

• The Less Deceived (1954)

His poetry is clear, rooted in everyday experience, in a physical

landscape, describing familiar habits, and pervaded by a quiet

pessimism Mr Bleaney (1955)

• The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

• High Windows (1974)

His pessimism has become increasingly more bitter and outspoken. His

poetry shows a new frankness, at times provocative.

His Poems

• His poetry is deliberately simple in language and subject matter.

• It rejects:

a. the intellectualism of the first Modernists;

b. the committed political stances of the 1930s generation.

• He writes about:

a. post-war-middle-class Britain;

b. provincial England.

The Subjects of His Poetry

• It was highly personal.

• A plain language and a prosaic rhythm.

• Larkin’s poems reproduce common speech and colloquial language.

• He used traditional forms.

Larkin’s Style

• The reader is plunged into the middle of a scene presented as in a

play, with alternated dialogue.

• Stanzas 1 and 2 the landlady talks about the previous

tenant, Mr Bleaney.

• Stanza 3 the new tenant speaks.

the identification of the new tenant with Mr Bleaney becomes clear:

I lieWhere Mr Bleaney lay stub my fags

On the same saucer-souvenir

Mr Bleaney (1955)

By the end of stanza 5 we know of Mr Bleaney’s solitary life:

His preference for sauce to gravy, He kept on plugging at the four aways Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk Who put him up for summer holidays, And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.

Larkin has no solution to offer and shows a deep disillusionment with

life.

Mr Bleaney (1955)

The tone of the the final stanzas is one of doubt:

But ……………. ‘I don’t know’

What the narrator doesn’t know is whether really

how we live measures our own nature

In the end, the poem reveals philosophical and ethical depth.

Mr Bleaney (1955)