philip larkin critics

Bryan Appleyard - His dreary, predictable…

damp, reductive misery tolls relentlessly.

R. Draper - Sympathy and…

humanitarianism are what inspired him.

Leo Cox - Larkin exploits his social remoteness by…

adopting a position of insightful superiority over his subjects.

Leo Cox - The characters in many of Larkin’s poems may…

reflect his own sense of detachment and disillusionment.

Andrew Motion - Larkin’s poetry grows…

out of rage: the rage of ‘shame’.

Janice Rossen - So much of Larkin’s habitual…

melancholy is driven by intense fury.

Leo Cox - Larkin feels cheated…

by existence

Leo Cox - Larkin uses nature as…

a medium for discussing his preoccupation with how transient and pointless everything in the world is.

Leo Cox - Many seen Larkin as ‘the archetypal English poet’ because…

for all his criticism and cynicism, he had a great love for his country and its culture.

Philip Larkin - What I want readers to carry away from the poem in their minds is…

not the poem, but the experience

Richard Palmer - Mr. Bleaney

It is a poet afraid of madness, who envies ‘Bleaney’ and his insufferably sane routine.

Richard Palmer - What frightened Larkin most…

was the prospect of going mad.

Richard Palmer - Dockery and Son

A poem that modulates into an uncommonly moving tough serenity. The last lines have something decisive and didactic about them.

Margaret Weldhen - How disastrous it is to…

confuse Larkin with his narrator and thereby assume that one knows the poet’s mind.

Philip Larkin - It is unhappiness that…

provokes a poem. Being happy doesn’t provoke a poem.

Lisa Jardine - The Britishness of Larkin’s poetry carries…

a baggage of attitudes

John Betjemin - He has certainly closed the gap between poetry and…

the public which the experiments and obscurity of the last 50 years have done so much to widen.

Monica Jones - When Philip was younger he was constantly torn between…

wanting to be conventional and the even stronger desire of wanting to be alone.

Philip Larkin - A poet never thinks of…

his reader. The reader doesn’t come into the poem at all.

Janice Rossen - Larkin’s fury against women is not so much a…

declared stage of siege against them personally as it is an eternal battle raging within himself.

Andrew Motion - Death, in Larkin’s view, is…

an utterly comfortless blank. The frequency in which he envisages its approach go a long way towards explaining why he is so often regarded as pessimistic.

Bryan Appleyard - Larkin is a hopeless…

and inflexible pessimist.

Peter Levi - Larkin’s poems are more alive in…

a cogitating state than in the sophisticated physical one.

Bryan Appleyard - He is an advocate for…

misanthropy and pessimism

Christopher Ricks - He writes like something…

almost being said, it is a study in self-pity.