KIJAHS/JAN-MAR2017/VOL-4/ISS-1/A29
ISSN:2348-4349
IMPACT FACTOR(2017) – 7.9183 KAAV INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ARTS,HUMANITIES
& SOCIAL SCIENCES
ASPECTS OF REALITY AND ISOLATION IN PHILIP
LARKIN’S POETRY
Ms. MOHINI KAUSHIK
Assistant Professor
Dept. of English
AMM, Bhiwani
Fairness to myself, it must be admitted that it is particulary potent music, as Philip Larkin was a
poet, novelist and essayist. He published two novels Jill (1946) and A girl in winter (1947). His
early poems published in 1945 under the title ‘The North ship’ showed signs of a future genius. He
was greatly influenced by yeats. Larkin was impressed by his poems. He says, “As a result I spent
the next three years trying to write like yeats not because I liked his personality or understood his
idea but out of infatuation with his music. In fairness to myself, it must be admitted that it is
particulary potent music, as pervasive as garlic and has ruined many a better talent.” His poems are
uncharacteristically rhapsodic and rhetorical. A privately printed pamphlet XX poems marked the
emergence of his true poetic voice but it was the publication of The Less Deceived (1955) which
brought Larkin’s natural work before the public for the first time and established his first public
Persona and recurrent themes. Partly because of its title, taken from the poem ‘Deceptions,’ The
less Deceived left some readers with a misleading impression of unrelieved scoptician in Larkin’s
work. He developed many of the themes from this collection. Eptein wonders at Larkin’s skill as a
poet when he says “what is impressive is the way that he was, that he may be able to generalise his
own apartness into persuasive poems about the isolation, the loneliness that is part of the condition
of us all.” Bruce Martin says that “loneliness or at least the sense of being left out colours almost all
of Larkin’s speakers and their personal situations,” this sense of exclusion stresses the importance
of social experience in Larkin’s poetry. Thus Larkin separates society and solitude as opposites. But
in doing so with reference to a pattern of movement. Initiation preceeds from isolation to
integration. The loneliness which his protagonists feel cones in part from being unable to complete
this transition. And it is this frustration which he polarises with opposites. Larkin describes his
youth as a ‘forgotten boredom’. This suggests isolation, lack of initiation or to society solitude
tension.
Copyright © 2017 Published by kaav publications. All rights reserved www.kaavpublications.org 262 KIJAHS/JAN-MAR2017/VOL-4/ISS-1/A29
ISSN:2348-4349
IMPACT FACTOR(2017) – 7.9183 This tension is obviously soon in all Larkin’s poems. The uncompleted initiation experience is soon
even in his poem. ‘The less Deceived.’ Larkin in his ‘next, please’ assumes a future filled with
happiness simply because time moves forward. One can also feel the future’s ultimate approach is a
foreboding ship of death. Minor disappointments and missed opportunities is the inference we get
in the poem ‘Afternoons’- a poem which describes the working class mothers. Wedding dreams are
replaced by Televisions. The ‘Unstable wind’ indicates a sense of waste.
Generally a sense of frustration is easily comprehensible in all his poems. Phrases like ‘wish to be
alone’, ‘desire of oblivion’. Printed directions of sex’, bring the poet into the society with all its
problems. A particular period of isolation is in fact, a central element of the initiation theme. The
poet has decided to live alone. He is self-conscious. He never wanted to be a participant. He stands
aloof and watches the dances inside the hall. He devalues the sense of community. In the poem
‘Places, Loved once’ gives the poet’s decision to stand alone.
“Therefore I stay outside
Believing this; and they maul to and fro
Believing that’ and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself or lied.”
Philip Larkin is an anti-modernist. To find his own poetic voice he had to shake off the influence of
yeats that pervaded his first volume. Openly Larkin has said ‘I … have no belief in ‘tradition’ or a
common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets’. He believed in
communicating as accurately as he can in words of experience. “Poetry is born of the tension
between what non- verbally feels and what he can be get ever in common word usage to someone
who hasn’t had his experience or education or travel grant.” David Lodge talks of Larkin as a
‘metonymic’ poet. He says, ‘Poetry, especially lyric poetry, is an inherently metaphoric mode, and
to displace it towards the metonymic pole an ‘experimental’ literary gesture. Such poetry makes its
impact by appearing daringly, even shockingly unpoetic, particularly when the accepted poetic
mode is elaborately metaphoric. This was true of early wordsworth, and it was certainly true of
Philip
Larkin in his post-North ship verse: nothing could have been more different from the poetry of
Dylan Thomas and the other ageing members of the ‘New Apocalypse,’ Larkin has many affinities
with wordsworth and seems to share words worth’s spontaneous overflow ‘theory of poetic
creation, which T.S. Eliot through he had disposed of in ‘Tradition and the individual Talent’, ‘one
should… write poetry only when one wants to and has to’, Larkin has remarked; and, ‘writing isn’t
an act of will’. His poetic style is characterised by colloquialism, ‘low’ diction and conscious
cliché”
Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with
Number plates.
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
‘Why, coventry I’ I exclaimed, ‘I was born here.’
With wordworth, Larkin might claim that his ‘Principal object … was to choose incidents and
Copyright © 2017 Published by kaav publications. All rights reserved www.kaavpublications.org 263 KIJAHS/JAN-MAR2017/VOL-4/ISS-1/A29
ISSN:2348-4349
IMPACT FACTOR(2017) – 7.9183 situations from common life, and to relate or describe then, throughout, as far as was possible in a
selection of language really used by men, tracing them truly, though not ostentatiously, this primary
laws of our nature, though it is from common urban-industrial life that he usually chooses thenshops, trains, hospitals, inner-city streets and parks. The gaudy mass-produced glamour of chain
store lingerie – Lemon, Sapphire, moss-green, rose Provides the occasion for a tentative,
uncondescending meditation on the mystery of
Bri-Nylon Baly-Della and Shorties
sexual allure:
How separate and unearthy love is,
or women are, or what they do,
or in our young unreal wishes
seem to be synthetic, new,
and natureless in ecstasies.
Some of his poems are based on extended analogies- ‘Next, Please’, ‘No Road’, and ‘Trade’, for
instance. But such poems become more rare in his later collection. All three just mentioned are in
The Less Deceived, and ‘Toads Revisited’ in The Whitesun Weddings makes a fairly perfunctory
use of the original metaphor. But if he stood and watched the frigid wind Tousling the clouds, lay
on the fusty bed Telling himself that this was home, and grinned And achieved, without shaking off
the dread. From the above passage, we observe a reversal drifiti a shift from satiric spleen vented
upon the external world to which the poetic persona feels superior-to a sudden collapse of his own
morale, a chilling awareness that this environment may correspond to his own in her nature. As far
as the theme of reality is concerned, there are the realities of common world. There is a disposition
of mind which is central to Larkin’s personal-regardless of their different emotional biases and it is
an empirical, attending one. His poetry can be said to be traditional in its maintenance of this
vigorous capacity for alertness to the familiar world. Reality is present in the typical modernist
masterpiece but it is transformed into an objective correlative for a rear field statement about the
poet’s spiritual guest. The world of the modernist poem ‘is not the familiar world. It is a landscape
of the mind in which concrete metaphors, images and symbols act as the signifiers of a complex
state of spiritual internality. Larkin is impatient with the inevitable obscurity of such poetry and
easily he becomes an imagist aesthetic. Protesting against the pretended modernism, Larkin in his
interview to Ian Hamilton says, “I think a lot of the ‘myth-kitty’ business has grown out of that,
because first of all you have to be terribly educated’ you have to read everything to know these
things, and secondly you’ve got some how to work them in. But to me … the whole of classical and
biblical mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of
dead spots but dodges the writer’s duty to be original.” This has made the critics of Larkin dim his
poems in the context of the more immediate tradition of the movement poets. Most of Larkin’s
poetry is engaged in visual participation in the observable physical world. His speakers often
beckon the render, as they do in Hardy’s poetry, into a beholding process. This kind of invitation to
witness is not simply an accident of form. It is the result of an epistemological conviction that the
truth as Larkin sees it is inseperable from an attending alertness of mind. In a central way, Larkin’s
speakers are like passengers in the train in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.
The readers the product of the engagement of an empirical intelligence and flexible poetic
personality with the face of reality. As he has been observed by the critics of Larkin: We are
Copyright © 2017 Published by kaav publications. All rights reserved www.kaavpublications.org 264 KIJAHS/JAN-MAR2017/VOL-4/ISS-1/A29
ISSN:2348-4349
IMPACT FACTOR(2017) – 7.9183 involved in the process by Proxy, join the perceptual journey in so far as we are willing to respond
to the substance and suggestiveness of the world as he presents it. The reader does not venture far in
Larkin’s world unless he participates in the speaker’s curious glance. Any concentrated experience
of Larkin’s poetry includes the visual process of looking, noticing, gazing, even staring, at the
world, as it is carefully re-created in its ordinary and then extraordinary detail. The most casual
sorting of his lines in this regard gives evidence of at least his insistence on the importance of the
process. The centre of gravity in Larkin’s poetry is the physical world as it suggestively manifests
itself on the stage of his personal imagination. Larkin was against ‘abstract windiness’. It is the eye
that should lead the spirit. A poem like that of Betjeman should have ‘astonishing command of
detail, both visual and circumstantial: Larkin agrees with Hulme that ‘Poetry is not a counter
language but a visual concrete one. It is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand
over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you and to make you continuously see a
physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process.” For him the critical litmus test
of a poem, what makes it authentic, is its freshness which is difficult to sham:’ Freshness, convinces
you, you feel at once that the artist was in an actual physical state. You feel that for a minute: Much
of Larkin’s poetry centrally and exclusively contains a good deal of that zest and that freshness of
which Hulme speaks. The quality of freshness is there as part of Larkin’s authenticating reality but
the expressive dimension of his poetry transforms the attending glance into something much larger
more interesting and coherent. In ‘Mr. Bleaney’ the persona Larkin adopts is the one which he finds
most appreciate to the setting which he confronts. But his settings, like his personae, are not
especially chosen to be dreary ones, just as the epiphany which rises from the setting does not
always match the appearances of the setting as we are first led to view it.
Larkin significantly emphasises a close connection between seeing, thinking and feeling. In his
view, each poem re-creates a real perception and moves it upward to transcend time in the qualified
way the work of art can. In his statement of his preserving instinct he echoes Lawrence, and also the
Imagist notion once expressed by Hulme, that ‘Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid
patches of life,’ and that in a sense ‘Life is composed of exquistic moments and the rest is only
shadows of them.
To sum up we can say that Larkin’s themes of isolation and reality turns up his ‘intensive’
movements, his epiphanies, as individual ‘miracle of logic; and he refused to methodise his
imagination in spite of his critics,’ impatience with his unwillingness to do so. The upshot is that
criticism has tended intolerantly to abstract a view of reality from any given poem and to forge a
conclusiveness to the poet’s vision and name it is the poet’s own.
Work cited
•
•
•
•
•
Hawkes, Terence. Textual Practice. Cambridge: Routledge, 1955.
Larkin, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin.
Lodge, David. Philip Larkin. Great Britain: Longman Group LTD, 1981.
Internet sources.
http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/The movement (literature), P.1.
Copyright © 2017 Published by kaav publications. All rights reserved www.kaavpublications.org 265