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6. Philip Larkin (1922-1985) and the Movement
Poets
Life
Miseries and
sufferings were in the post-war Britain as far as the eyes stretched. In
1956, Robert Conquest, an English poet published New Lines: An Anthology,
which included the poems by a group of young poets who were then called ��The
Movement Poets�� consisting of Donald Davie (1922- ),
Thom Gunn (1929- ), the
Anglo-American poet,
Kingsley Amis, one of ��The Angry Young Men�� and John Wain. The Movement Poets were against the Neo-Romanticism and the obscure
imagery of Dylan Thomas who used to be popular during the Second World War.
They were also against the experiment carried by Modernists like Pound and
T. S. Eliot in the early decades of the twentieth century. They attempted to
revive the indigenous tradition of English poetry and put great emphasis on
regular rhyming and plain style of poetry. Their poetry seemed to be an
accurate reflection of post-war world. With grief and disappointment, they
often watched attentively the society and human life like a stander-by.
There was rare idealist or romantic passion in their poems. The frigidness,
sobriety and dissatisfaction prevailed everywhere in their poems.
The best and most important poet in the Movement was Philip Larkin
(1922-1985). He was from a middle-class family and entered Oxford in 1940.
Later, he worked as the librarian of the Hull University Library for many
years.
In 1945, Larkin published his first collection of poems,
The North Ship, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl
in Winter (1947). The first anthology, in which Larkin imitated Yeats in
his writing, did not receive much recognition from the public. In 1946,
Larkin discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a great admirer of
his poetry, learning from Hardy how to make the commonplace and dreary
details of his life the basis for extremely tough, unsparing and memorable
poems. Since 1950, Larkin entered his maturity in poetic creation and
published the second volume of poetry The Less Deceive (1955), which
was considered as the best work of the Movement Poets. His reputation as a
major poet was strengthened by the publication of The Whitsun Weddings
(1964) and High Windows (1974). He also edited The Oxford Book
of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). Deeply anti-social and a
great lover (and published critic) of American jazz, Larkin never married
and conducted an uneventful life as a librarian. He died in Hull in 1985.
Poems
The most influential poet in Larkin��s poetic career was
Thomas Hardy. He is more traditional than modernist in poetic creation. He
is fond of plain style with terse words. The meaning in his poem is conveyed
straightforward. These poems are of consummate skills but of few sparkling
sayings. In one of his poem, ��Mr. Bleaney��, each stanza consisted 4 lines
and was written in iambic pentameter with regular rhyme (a b a b). The last
three stanzas read:
He kept on plugging at the four aways��
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas at his sister��s house in Stoke.
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 shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don��t know.
In the poem, Larkin used many colloquial words
and idioms to describe the three characters, Mr. Bleaney, the landlady and
the poet. The sketch of each character bore an irony to those hopeless men
and their hopeless life. They symbolized a kind of baffle in the search for
the purpose of life. The plain style and the pessimism of the poem bore
obvious traits of Hardy.
The world, in Larkin��s poems, was gray and
disappointing. In ��Church Going��, one of his best poems, his skill on
rhyming had developed to a mature stage, Larkin, as an observer, depicted
the post-war anxious and contemplative British�� their mistrust in
everything.
I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, so seek
This place for what it was:
��
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
Pessimism and despair were two dominant notes in
Larkin��s poems. In his eyes, only the fading past was beautiful and
memorable. Unlike modernists, he had been so honest and accurate in
depicting the ruined Britain in 1950s that it seemed that his poems were
insipid and dull. In fact, many deep meanings and feelings existed under the
plain style.
Larkin was not a prolific poet, but the great contribution he
made to the English poetry, particularly in technique, has made him much
outrank all the other Movement Poets.
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