Larkin context

Question 1

Subject matter

Answer 1

Writes about life of individuals in 1950s/60s- poems about marginal characters who are often disappointed by life and isolated from others.

Question 2

Poetic style

Answer 2

Often uses third person in poems like Love songs in Age and Afternoons where the reader is more at a distance from the experiences of the people he identifies.

Question 3

Language

Answer 3

Larkin writes in the language of everyday speech but he sticks to traditional patterns of rhythm and meter.
Also uses lyrical and beautiful imagery carefully constructed rhyme and rhythm- “spread out like a spring- woken tree, wherein that hidden freshness sung”

Question 4

Structure

Answer 4

Poems develop from a concrete setting, snatch of dialogue or experience described in vivid detail. Poems end and open with more philosophical, abstract statements about the deeper significance of these concrete experiences.

Question 5

Influences

Answer 5

Thomas Hardy: use of traditional verse forms, honest pessimism about failed relationships and mortality. Use of external world to reflect the internal world.
W.B Yeats: lyrical beauty combined with awareness of his own mortality.
The Movement poets: Movement poets believed in using traditional metre and rhyme whilst also giving it a “talking voice” which the average, ordinary person might be able to understand and relate to.

Question 6

Social and Cultural factors

Answer 6

Post war gloom- seen in poems which reflect “lowered expectations” and hardship- Afternoons, Talking in Bed
Rejection of modern world as seen in new housing estates built to house a post war population boom and increasing industrialisation and commercialisation- parts of Talking in Bed, Self’s the man, Sunny Prestayn
Rejection of conventional masculine expectations: Self’s the Man, Wild Oats
Absence of faith in religion.