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.’
