critical voices Flashcards
Elise Dali
“the notion of the romantic countryside, according to Larkin, has been sullied by the presence of modernisation”
Nick Johnston Jones
“the poetic persona may vary between poems, but solitude and separation are common figure”
James Naremore
“Larkin seldom presents himself as anything but the onlooker”
James Naremore (pt2)
“Larkin presents himself as a scepticism, less deceived observer of contemporary life”
Andrew Swarbrick
“His writing is driven by a sense of failure in both”
Andrew Swarbrick (pt2)
“At the centre of Larkin’s poetry is their pursuit of definition, a self which feels threatened by the proximity of others but which fears that without relationships with otherness the self has no validity”
John Press
“Larkins poetry reflects the dreariness of postwar provincial England and voices most articulately and poignantly the spiritual desolation of a world which men have shed the last rags of religious faith that once meant meaning and hope to human lives”
Andrew Motion
“The unattainable beauty, the untried experience, only keeps its bloom because it never becomes actual”
John Boyley - Afternoons
“wholly in keeping with the drab, diminished, unillusioned spirit of post war Britain’s, a poet of low keyed vernacular honestly, whose every line seemed to be saying - come off of it”
Peter Dickinson - For Sidney Bechet
“the colloquial and ironic aspects of Larkins poetic language derive from the stance and the language of the jazz musician”
Roma Shrestha
“Larkins poetry often takes an unsentimental look at love, frequently presenting it as little more than a biological mechanism to ensure the human races reproduction”
John Betjeman
“the laureate of the housing estates”
InterestingLiterature.com- Toads Revisited
“the road was seized upon by the poet Marianne Moore as a metaphor for the ugliness of that good poetry needs to contain. “Imaginary gardens with real toads in them” was her assessment of poetry: the garden can be as beautiful as you like, but it must have a taint of grim reality about it. “Toads” are unpoetic enough; to revisit them seems like wilful subversion”
Terry Eagleton
“A death- obsessed, emotionally-retarded misanthropist who had the impudence to generalise his own fears and failings to the way things are”
I. D. McCatchy
Larkin wrote in “clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, shouted stunted lives and spoiled desires”
