Philip Larkin

## Biography

**LARKIN, Philip Arthur** (1922-1985), **poet and novelist**, born in Coventry and educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and at St John's College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of K. Amis and **developed an interest in jazz which was later to produce a volume of essays**, *All What Jazz* (1970). From 1943 **he worked in various libraries before becoming librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull**. **Larkin's early poems appeared in an anthology, *Poetry from Oxford in Wartime* (1944), and a collection, The *North Ship* (1945)**, and were, by his own account, **much influenced by Yeats**. He then published *Jill* (1946), set in wartime Oxford, a novel which describes the undergraduate career of John Kemp, a working class boy from Lancashire, and his encounters with the world of traditional privilege; Jill is the fantasy sister he creates, who is transformed into a teasing reality. A second novel, *A Girl in Winter* (1947), relates a day in the life of refugee librarian Katherine Lind, working in a drab English provincial town, with a lengthy flashback to an abortive adolescent romance with a penfriend. **Larkin's own poetic voice (with a new allegiance to Hardy rather than Yeats) became distinct in "The Less Deceived" (1955), where the colloquial bravura of a poem like "Toads" is offset by the half-tones and somewhat bitter lyricism of other pieces**; **his name was at this time associated with The Movement, and his work appeared in *New Lines*** (1956). The Whitsun Weddings (1964) adds a range of melancholy urban and suburban provincial landscapes, a satiric sociological commentary, and more stoic wit, manifested in "Toads Revisited", with its characteristic Larkin conclusion: "Give me your arm, old toad; I Help me down Cemetery Road." Many of the poems in *High Windows* (1974), notably "The Old Fools", show a preoccupation with death and transience; in "Annus Mirabilis" and "Posterity" the poet ironically places himself as somewhat defiantly out of date; in the words of his fictitious American biographer: "One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys." **Throughout his work, the adaptation of contemporary speech rhythms and vocabulary to an unobtrusive metrical elegance is highly distinctive**. Larkin edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973). A volume of essays, *Required Writing*, was published in 1983.

Larkin became a leading figure of “The Movement,” term to describe a group of British poets during the 1950s (Donald Davie, Kingsley Amis, D. J. Enright, and Thom Gunn, among others) who addressed everyday British life in plain, straightforward language, and reacted against the vogue enjoyed at that time by Dylan Thomas’ New Romantic poetry.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### The Movement

The years after 1945 saw both continuities and changes in English poetry. Some poets, despite Modernism, continued Romantic traditions, writing deeply personal responses to the world and engaging with ‘eternal’, ‘elemental’ themes. The central viewpoint in their poems is an ‘I’, a single voice, recording experiences directly and shaping them in generally traditional poetic forms. Other poets are not as clearly in the Romantic tradition. The ‘I’ in their poems is more indirect, and experience is presented more ironically. The focus is restricted, concentrating more on the particulars of everyday life.

The common assumption is that the Movement was largely a reaction against the inflated romanticism of the 1940s, a victory of common sense and clarity over obscurity and mystification, of verbal restraint over stylistic excess: in short, the virtues of Philip Larkin over those of Dylan Thomas.

The name given to a group of English poets in the 1950s who stressed irony, restraint, self-doubt, and the celebration of ordinary life. Among its practitioners were Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, and, most notably, Philip Larkin. These poets were consciously reacting against what they regarded as the pretentious, ornate poetry of the 1940s, represented by the verse of Dylan Thomas and the New Apocalypse Movement.

During the Festival of Britain, the Barrow Poets hoped to hawk their verse in the streets, but when a licence was refused **they gave readings in pubs and public places, a venture which not only succeeded but encouraged the idea of bringing poetry to the masses**. Very much different was what became known as The Movement resulting from Poets of the 50s (1950) edited by Dennis Joseph Enright (1920-) and another collection from largely the same poets, *New Lines* (1956, 1963) edited by Robert Conquest (1917-). **The Movement professed no interest in stylistic innovation, and in neo-classic mood concerned itself with reality**. Most of the poets concerned were academics--Wain, Amis, Holloway, Davie, Enright himself; with them were Larkin, Gunn, and Jennings. Enright's own poems, such as Laughing Hyena (1953), Some Men Are Brothers (1960), The Old Adam (1965), deal with individual man in all his conditions, showing pity and indignation for his sufferings, and faith in his innate dignity. His language is based on colloquial speech stripped of elaborations, a style that well suits his ironical disgust of hypocrisy and cruelty.

The Movement was united by **a sensibility shaped by a shared antipathy to the cultural pretensions of Bohemia and Bloomsbury and to what it saw as the elitism of much Modernist writing**. It would be preposterous to cast the self effacing Larkin as a prototype of the ‘angry young man’ of the late 1950s, but his was a distinctive and to some degree representative new voice.

## Bibliography

Philip Larkin’s novel *Jill* (1946) is set in an Oxford from which Arnold’s ‘last enchantments of the Middle Age’ and Waugh’s *douceur de la vie* have been banished by the make-do-and-mend mentality of the Second World War. ‘Life in college was austere’, Larkin wrote in the introduction he added to the novel in 1963, ‘Its pre-war pattern had been dispersed, in some instances permanently. Everyone paid the same fees ... and ate the same meals ... At an age when self importance would have been normal, events cuts us ruthlessly down to size.’ Jill is remarkable not simply for its picture of an Oxford forced into a dispirited egalitarianism by the war, but also for its introduction of what became a common theme in the literature of the 1950s and 1960s, the awkward self consciousness of provincial, lower-middleclass England and the upward mobility of a grammar-school educated intelligentsia. Although Larkin (1922-85) was not of the generation which benefited most from the provisions of the 1944 Education Act, he was typical of a new breed of articulate university graduate. As the key poet of the post-war decades he was also to chart other social and cultural changes with a sardonic percipience. Larkin was the most significant of a loose group of writers known in the early 1950s as ‘the Movement’, a group assumed by those who disliked what it stood for to be the typical product of wartime planning and the Welfare State.

* **Poetry collections:**
	+ *The North Ship* (1945)
	+ *The Less Deceived* (1955)
	+ *The Whitsun Weddings* (964)
	+ *High Windows* (1974)
* **Fiction:**
	+ *Jill* (1946)
	+ *A Girl in Winter* (1947)

### Literary Style

Very much a loner is Philip Larkin. He accepts defeatism and rootlessness as part of existence. There is in his work a sense of loss, of beauty, departed, of the changing qualities of English life. He obtains his pleasures (though often melancholy ones) from his observation of little situations and places, and from dwelling on their associations, all very personal, and he expresses them in a clear, easily comprehended fashion.

#### Parody

The title *The Less Deceived* alludes to Ophelia’s words in Shakespeare’s *Hamlet*. She has been told by an apparently insane Hamlet he loved her once, only to hear from him afterwards he did not. Conscious of the cruel deception she has been prey to, she exclaims. “I was the more deceived” (Shakespeare, 812). Larkin’s parodic strategy of inverting Ophelia’s words already gives us a clear sense of his cynic view of the world around him and of his own life, imprinting in the poems from this collection an uncompromising self awareness and an intense self-critical honesty. His refusal to resort to illusion, deception, and sentimentalism as sources of hope and meaning in life seduces the reader and invites us to do away with that Romantic simplistic optimism which separates us from reality, from the naked truth of life and death.

## I Remember, I Remember

The speaker in “I remember, I remember” tells us of a train journey he takes with his friend, and of its unexpected stop at Coventry--his birth place. The view and sudden recognition of his half-forgotten hometown makes him exclaim he was born there, and triggers an embedded musing on his childhood, which is full of cynicism and bitterness. It is interesting to point out how Larkin makes use of his poem to establish “difference at the heart of similarity”, ironically inverting “I remember, I remember” by Thomas Hood (1799-1845) and “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas (1914- 1953). Thomas Hood published his popular “I remember, I remember” in a clear Romantic vein in 1827. Divided into four stanzas which start with an echo of the title in a refrain, the poem presents us with a nostalgic speaker who longs for his childhood and enumerates his sweet memories of the past only to contrast them with the present, when adulthood has erased everything that was pure, innocent and happy about it, concluding in the last verses that:”… now 'tis little joy/ To know I'm farther off from Heaven /Than when I was a boy.” Larkin’s poem, on the contrary, careful omits the word “remember,” enumerates a series of pleasant experiences he has never had, and reminds us with his last verses that nothing, or at least nothing worth writing about, has happened in his childhood.

It was also “Fern Hill,” Dylan Thomas’ most popular poem, what he had in mind when he wrote “I remember, I remember,” and that his intention was to revise it in the way other poets from “The Movement” had revisited Thomas’ poetry. “Fern Hill,” published in 1946 and full of rhapsodic lyricism, is a poem whose speaker evokes his childhood in the farm with exuberant images and dreamlike, pastoral metaphors which are reminiscent of scenes from the Garden of Eden, and concludes the poem mourning his lost youth, when he was not conscious yet of his being “in the mercy of his [time] means.” Even when there are no explicit instances of intertextuality in Larkin’s poem that might allude to Thomas’ poem directly, the parodic nature of the text, can be seen in the questioning and refunctionalization of conventions of different kinds. In this case, the Romantic principle of idealization of one’s childhood and the subsequent view of adulthood as the inevitable corruption of that pure and perfect stage of life one should forever long for is reverted in favor of a more realistic—yet ironic—outlook on one’s early years. Larkin convinces us that children’s life can also be uneventful, boring, and gloomy. Indeed, the Romantic subscription to overjoyed, passionate rhetoric as a means to pay tribute to that “angelical” period of our lives is turned upside down with Larkin’s unpoetic language to speak about an uninteresting childhood, and by doing so from his stance of critical distance he proposes a new aesthetic and poetic model.

In order to speak about his unhappy past, Larkin chooses an intricate and complicated pattern in sets of three end rhymes which are repeated and permuted in four nine-line arrangements which do not coincide with the division of the poem into stanzas (abc, cba, abc, def, fed, def, ghi, ihg, ghi, jkl, lkj, jkl). On the other hand, the tone in the target texts is also evidently subverted in Larkin’s poem. While the former is clearly sentimental and nostalgic, the latter is highly ironic, caustic, and sarcastic. Larkin is careful to keep his register conversational, deprived of figurative language, and parodies their vivid metaphorical language by transforming them into clichés by use of inverted commas: Phrases like “have your roots”?, “mine,” “really myself” and “all became a burning mist” clearly question and attack those sentimental celebrations of one’s past in those poems written after a Neo Romantic fashion, which, according to The Movement, were burdened with an excess of nostalgia and mysticism.

### Poem

 **Irony:** | The poem is filled with the use of the negative,implying that the experiences describeddid not happen (verbal irony)

1. Coming up England by a different line

2. For once, early in the cold new year,

3. We stopped, and, watching men with number plates

4. Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,

5. "Why, Coventry!" I exclaimed. "I was born here."

6. I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign

7. That this was still the town that had been 'mine'

8. So long, but found I wasn't even clear

9. Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates

10. Were standing, had we annually departed

11. For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:

12. Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.

13. 'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'

14. No, only where my childhood was unspent,

15. I wanted to retort, just where I started:

16. By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.

17. Our garden, first: where I did not invent

18. Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,

19. And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.

20. And here we have that splendid family

21. I never ran to when I got depressed,

22. The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,

23. Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be

24. 'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,

25. The bracken where I never trembling sat,

26. Determined to go through with it; where she

27. Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.

28. And, in those offices, my doggerel

29. Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read

30. By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

31. Who didn't call and tell my father There

32. Before us, had we the gift to see ahead -

33. 'You look as though you wished the place in Hell,'

34. My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,

35. I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

36. 'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

**Ryhming pattern:** Three end rhymes repeated in four nine line arrangements which don’t coincide with the division of the poem into stanzas (ABCCB AABCD EFFED DEFGH IIHGG HIJKL LKJJK L)

**Tone:**: Bitter, sarcastic, caustic

**Main theme:** The gloomy, boring, uneventful character of childhood.

## Intro Paragraph

During the 1950s an intellectual group of British poets, with Philip Larkin (1922-1985) as the leading figure, were united into “The Movement” by a shared antipathy to the Neo-Romanticism lead by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) during the 1930s and 1940s. “The Movement” aimed at objective, truthful and common-sense writings as a reaction against the idealistic treatment of themes and the aesthetic forms portrayed in the neo-romantic poetry. In this context, Philip Larkin’s poetry mainly exposes a realistic and plain view as is the case of  1955´s Philips Larkins’s notable poem, “I Remember, I Remember”, about a dull recollection of the speaker’s youth while passing by his birth place on a train journey with his friend. In this eight-stanza poem, the author explores an uneventful and down-to earth view of childhood by a parodic strategy in both content and form.

### MLA citation

Larkin, Philip. "I Remember, I Remember." *Philip Larkin -poems-*, Poem Hunter, 2004, pp. 35.

## Sources

1. ↑  Drabble, Margaret. *The Oxford Companion to English Literature*. Oxford University Press, 2000.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2  Mussetta, Mariana. "Parodic traits in Larkin’s 'I remember, I remember.' OSF, 3 June 2020. Web.
3. ↑  Carter, Ronald, and John McRae. *The Routledge History of Literature in English*. Routledge, 2002.
4. ↑  Roberts, Neil. *The Blackwell Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry*. 2001. Blackwell, 2003.
5. ↑  Quinn, Edward. *A Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms*. Facts on Life, 2006.
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1  Albert, Edward. *History of English Literature*. 1979. Oxford University Press, 2000.
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1  Sanders, Andrew. *The Short Oxford History of English Literature*. Clarendon Press, 1994.