Larkin

Question 1

Marsh on life in ‘Home is So Sad’

Answer 1

The idea that ‘life deprives us of freedom and steadily “hardens” can be found in Home is So Sad’

Question 2

Regan and post-war malaise

Answer 2

Larkin’s writing ‘seemed to encapsulate the authentic experience of a drab and disillusioned England’

Question 3

Regan and fragmentation of culture

Answer 3

Larkin’s poems ‘prove so responsive to the fractures and collisions in post-war English culture’

Question 4

What did Blake Morrison ascribe Larkin to, and what are its characteristics?

Answer 4

‘The Movement’ - anti-romantic and anti-elitist

Question 5

How does Regan relate Larkin to Hardy?

Answer 5

Calls him a ‘Hardy-esque poet [who is] stoically accepting of the way things are’

Question 6

Marsh and illusion

Answer 6

Larkin ‘insists on the human need to dream’

Question 7

Classic McClatchy

Answer 7

‘stunted lives’ and ‘spoiled desires’

Question 8

Larkin on his inspiration

Answer 8

‘deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’

Question 9

Marsh on consumerism

Answer 9

Larkin’s poetry ‘explores the relationship between advertising’s impossible dreams of life and the tawdry experience of living’

Question 10

Marsh and English culture

Answer 10

‘frantically attempting to fill the vacuum left by discarded values, and particularly religious beliefs’

Question 11

Brownjohn on life and illusion

Answer 11

For Larkin, life is ‘gradually accumulating certainty that its golden prizes are sheer illlusion’

Question 12

Jones on Larkin’s separation and identity

Answer 12

Larkin avoided the ‘metropolitan’, ‘literary’ and the ‘group label’, refereed the ‘provincial’, ‘nonliterary’ and the ‘purely personal’

Question 13

King on truth of life and death

Answer 13

Larkin attempts to make the reader “less deceived”… before the realities of life and death’

Question 14

King and Larkin’s separation and perspective

Answer 14

‘Larkin’s typical stance [is] one of being to one side of life, watching himself and others with a detached eye’

Question 15

Motion on Larkin’s anti-elitism and demotism

Answer 15

Writes for the ‘common man’

Question 16

Naremore and isolation

Answer 16

‘Larkin seldom presents himself as anything but the onlooker’

Question 17

Larkin on marriage

Answer 17

‘Let me remember that the only state of marriage I know (i.e. that of my parents) is bloody hell’

Question 18

Larkin on poetry as a

Answer 18

‘begin with emotion in the poet and end with the same emotion in the reader’

Question 19

Perry on Larkin’s emotional state

Answer 19

‘embodies the emotional constipation of the English male’

while also ‘being the most poignant of late twentieth-century poets’

Question 20

Larkin considered ____ in his approach

Answer 20

Larkin considered ‘empirical’ in his approach - concerned with experience rather than theory

Question 21

Larkin on Hardy and poetry

Answer 21

‘taught one to feel rather than to write’

Question 22

Larkin on Hull

Answer 22

His ‘lonely northern daughter’

Question 23

King on Larkin and Hardy and society

Answer 23

Hardy taught Larkin ‘that a modern poet could write about the life around him in the language of the society around him’

Question 24

Corcoran on modernism

Answer 24

Despite Larkin’s criticism of modernism, Corcoran has noted some modernist elements in his writing

Question 25

Croft on class

Answer 25

‘Larkin seems to cling to [class] - perhaps reflecting his right-wing political leanings and desire to maintain the status quo of a pre-war Britain when such things were familiar and easier to navigate’