Philip Larkin: Poetry that Builds Bridges

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is today acclaimed as a British national cultural icon. Historically a “Movementeer,” Larkin followed the “Pleasure principle” to democratize poetry by forging a distinctive philistine aesthetic, by employing a defiantly demotic diction, and by building his poems around a structure of rational discourse. Philip Larkin: Poetry That Builds Bridges is a well-researched and immensely readable book. It is perhaps the only work available today that offers a comprehensive critical account of the full range of Larkin’s poetry. A significant contribution to Larkin studies, this book provides a between-the-lines analysis of almost all the poems embodied in the four major collections of Larkin –The North Ship, the less deceived, The Whitsum Weddings and High Windows. By exploiting the resources of Larkin’s letters, his prose writings and his biography, the author traces, much against the grain of contemporary Larkin criticism, the poet’s thematic, attitudinal and technical development from one book of his poetry to the next, and shows the trend of Larkin’s evolution. With a holistic approach to the total corpus of Larkin’s poetry, the author perspectives the poet, and argues that Larkin’s achievements lie in his success in building in building bridges between Aestheticism and Philistinism, between Empiricism and Transcendentalism, between Classicism and Romanticism, between Modernism and Postmodernism, between the native British poetic tradition and the Anglo=Franco-American Experimental line, and, above all, between poetry and the reading public. This book also contends that Larkin’s vision of life is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but tragic and melioristic. This volume further shows Larkin’s poetry as dealing with the ‘Collective unconscious” of man as reveled in his desire to rise above the empirical, logocentric reality and to reach a supramental, transcendental plane. The approach to Larkin’s poetry is original, and his analyses of the individual Larkin poems are incisive and insightful, though they are done in a remarkably lucid manner. While Larkin scholars and students will immensely benefit from this book, general readers too will find it interesting and enjoyable.