Duffy and Larkin AO5 Flashcards
Katherine Viner - love and the past
‘Duffy’s poetry was filled with lost loves and yearning for the past.’
Katherine Viner - accessibility
‘her poems are accessible and entertaining.’
Duffy - the woman herself regarding simplicity of language
‘I like to use simple words, but in a complicated way.’
‘I am trying to reveal the truth, so it can’t have a fictional beginning.’
Jody Allen Randolph - what haunts her verse 👻
‘Failure, loneliness, isolation and emptiness haunt her verse.’
Duffy - once again the woman herself - temporality through a window
‘that wonderful life that goes on behind the lighted windows through which we all peek as we hurry past.’
Duffy - love
‘i was exploring the end of love, of love gone wrong.’
Larkin - the geezer himself - happiness and sadness
‘It’s sadness that provokes a poem. Being happy doesn’t provoke a poem.’
John Goodby’s - tackinesss
‘The tackiness of mass commodities fascinates him.’
Salem K. Hussan - unfulfillment, melancholy innit
‘The melancholy vein which runs through Larkin’s poetry comes from his feelings that one has not got out of life what life has to offer.’
Martin - Larkin’s life could become poems
‘his life with its often casual discoveries could become poems.’
McClatchy - what on earth did Larkin write about?
‘stunted lives and spoiled desires’
John McRae - taking the familiar and…
‘takes the familiar and defamiliarises it’
Motion
Larkin “is so often regarded as an unrelievedly pessimistic poet”.
Larkin - the commonplace
‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace…I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’
Duffy - on the meaning of her collection ‘mean time’
‘In the collection, I mean to write about time. The effects of time can be mean. Mean can mean average. The dwindling of childhood. Ageing. The distance of history. The tricks of memory and the renewal of language. The end of love. Divorce. New love. Luck. And so on.’
Larkin - King’s reflection on Dockery and Son
“a poetry of disappointment, of the destruction of romantic illusions, of man’s defeat by time and his own inadequacies,”
