Duffy and Larkin Context

What year was Larkin born?

1922

When was ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ published?

1964

What year was Duffy born?

1955

When was ‘Mean Time’ published?

1993

What was the movement?

It was a group of novelists and poets of during the 1950s including Larkin.

• Published in influential antholagies such as ‘New Lines’ and ‘Poets of the 1950s’

How was the Movement unlike 1920s poetry?

Unlike the modernists of the 1920s whos work was often oblique/ difficult to understand, the Movement championed simplicity of form and expression.

• Often written in colloiqual language and inteded to be a form of everyday communication.

How was the Movement unlike 1930s poetry?

Major poets of the 1930s, such as WH Auden, had writen explicity about political work, but the Movement neglected politics nd instead wrote apolotical poems about everyday experiences.

How was the Movement unlike 1940s poetry?

The Movement’s poetry avoided the intense emotions of certain popular poets of the 1940s, such as Dylan Thomas.

Instead, the poems of the Movement kept emotions in their work firmly under control.

• For instance, they used an economy of expression and tight verse forms - regularity of stanzas and rhymes.

What did the Movement claim to write for?

Unlike the modernists, they claimed not to write poetry for a small group of ‘initiated’ people or academics.

But wanted to find a larger audience with whom their poems of everyday experience could resonate.

What was the Mersey Sound and Duffy connection to it?

Duffy was in a relationship with Adrian Henri for just over a decade from the age of 16.

Henri was one of the poets who published one of the best-selling poetry anthologies of all time, The Mersey Sound.

What was the Mersey Sound characterised as?

Accessible, humorous, unpretentious, and often concerned with local and everyday themes.

• One critic suggested that they ‘brought poetry down from the shelf and onto the street.’

• Ian Samson has argued that ‘Duffy’s poems are easy to understand, [exhibiting] an unpretentious clarity.’

• It’s very likely Henri was an instrument in shaping Duffy’s approach.

How did Larkin view his childhood/affect his poetry?

Larkin later viewed his childhood as a ‘forgotten boredom’

• ‘I was an unsuccessful schoolboy. You must remeber I was short-sighted and nobody relisesd it, and I also stammered’

• ‘and if you ever stammered, that’s enough to make you feel an outsider.’

Perhaps the escapist fantasies of in the opening stanza ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ can be read as a response to his difficult school yhears.

As well his anti-child feelings partly account for the speakers response to chidren in ‘Dockery and Son’ and ‘Self’s the man’

How did his parents affect his poetry?

His childhood was heavily shaped by his father, a right-wing authoritarian man, and his mother, who was somewhat passive and dominated by her husband.

• She was also a somewhat fragile woman who struggled with mental health and felt a serious sense of loss when her husband died in 1948

In 1957, he was inspired by his widowed mother to write ‘Love songs in age’ when visiting.

• A poem which juxtaposes the youthful feelings of love as a force that could ‘solve, satisfy and unchangeably order’, with a reflection of the living reality of widowhood.

What was Larkins education?

Larkin studied English Literature at St John’s, Oxford, and although the War was on (1939-45), he failed his medical due to poor eyesight and so was able to complete his degree and graduate in 1943.

• He became a librarian and a year later met Ruth Bowman, to whom he was engaged for two years. (Wild Oats)

What were Larkin’s Relationship and its affect?

Larkin met Monica Jones in 1946.

• It overlapped with Ruth Bowman, and when the latter ended, MJ became one of the most significant people in his life till his death.

• On his death, he left most of his states to her. - They were never married

However, they were never married, and L had another relationship with Maeve Brennan in the 1960s/70s.

• The poem, ‘Talking in Bed’ was written in 1960 an d its description of the loss of intimacy and communication might reflect his growing distance from Jons at the start of the affair with Brennan.

What was Larkin belief in marriage?

Larkin’s letters revelead how he was concerned with his limits of frreedom that reltion ships could bring so he reamined unmarried till death.

• He commeted ‘I often wonder why people get married. I think perhaps they dislike being alone more than i do.’

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This pessimistic outlook is perhaps reflected in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Self’s the Man’

When does Larkin present the figure of the ‘unattainable women’?

The figure of the ‘unattaintable’ or idealised women is a common feature of Larkin’s poetry, occuring in ‘Essential Beauty’ (‘that unfocused she’), ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ (the smiling ‘girl on the poster’) and the ‘rose’ of ‘Wild Oats’.

• He described his attitude to women as ‘a shrinking sensitivity, a morbid sense of sin, a furtie lechery’

• and some critics consider him to be misogynistic in his depiction of women.

What was the importance of 1950s Britain?

The 1950s in Britain were a period of post-war austerity (gov spending cuts leading to more severe social conditions).

• Rationing continued until 1954, and there was much rebuilding to be done.

• ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ mentions ‘new and non-descript towns’ and the poem ‘Here’ refers disparagingly to ‘raw estates’, reflecting Larkin’s distaste for the ‘modern’.

By 1957, Britain’s Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, would strike an optimistic tone, arguing that ‘most of our people had never had it so good’

• There is relatively little evidence of the new spirit of excitement in the collection.

• Despite the ‘swinging sixties’ and a ‘revolution in sexual politics’

What was Larkins religious views?

Described himself as agnostic (meaning he didn’t believe it’s possible to know whether God exists).

There are hints that Larkin seeks or experiences not exactly religious or spiritual, but something beyond the material world.

• An Arundel Tomb: ‘What will survive of us is love’

• Faith healing: ‘In everyone there sleeps/ A sense of life lived according to love’

• Whitsun Weddings: ‘all the power/that being changed can bring’

What was Duffys view on religion?

She became atheiest in childhood

• Raised in the Catholic Church and went to a convent school/

• Much imagery is derived from religious practices, e.g. Litany, Moments of Grace, Disgrace.

Once asked if she thinks poetry ‘to some extent takes the place of religion’ in a secular society.

• She replied ‘it does for me: I don’t believe in God.

• Her sonnet ‘Prayer’ is the voice of that secular spirtuality

Commeted that ‘Poetry and prayer are very similar. I write quite a lot of sonnets and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite’

What was her relationship like with her parents?

She had a good relationship with her parents but her childhood was disrupted when she moved from Glasgow, at the age of six to Stafford in the Midlands.

• Sense of dislocation reflected more figuratively in ‘Nostalgia’, where Swiss mercenaries develop a word (nostalgia) to describe their home-sickness.

What was her relationship like overall?

Like Larkin, she was somewhat unconventional in her relationships, even by the more liberal standards of the 1970s onwards.

During her time with Jackie Kay, Duffy gave birth to her daughter with the help of fellow poet Peter Benson.

• But midway through the 2000s, Duffy and Kay separated.

In summary, Duffy had experienced heterosexual and lesbian relationships, became a mother and then a single mother.

This range of relatively unconventional experiences might be linked to the changing nature of societal attitudes to relationships, sexuality and gender over this period.

• Perhaps unsurprising, then, she should explore the gender fluidity and sexuality of the troubled speaker in ‘The Cliche Kid’, which also deals with how society treats such departures from convention.

What was her relationship like in Adrian Henri?

She met Adrian Henri (20 yrs older than her) , when she was 16 and had a long relationship with him.

• The significance and power of this early relationship to still create emotion is reflected on in ‘First Love’

She lived with him until 1982 but they separated on good terms, perhaps reflected in the penultimate lines of the poem in which she remembers his ‘smile in my head on the last evening’

• Her memory of first love is depicted oxymoronically, as it both ‘pierce[s] and sweetn[s] the air’

What poems show the difference in generations and sexual awakening?

First love and others like ‘Moments of Grace’ and ‘Drunk’, also celebrate sexual awakening and young love, again a reflection of being born thirty years after Larkin.

She grew up in an era of greater personal freedoms than that in which Larkin wrote The Whitsun Weddings.

• Compare the images in Duffy’s poems with the frustrated desire of the speakers of ‘Wild Oats’ and ‘A Study of Reading Habits’

What was Duffys relationship like with Jackie Kay?

By 1991 Duffy began a 15 year relationship with female Scottish poet, Jackie Kay, writing ‘Valentime’ in the early stages.

• Transforming an onion into an enblem of love, creating a series of unexpectedly apt links between a vegetable and the complexity of relationships.

Perhaps she was uncertain of the future for their relationship, cautious in commitement, scarred by the past.

• Vulnerability is represented by the ‘tears’ and ‘fierce’ feelings that are ‘lethal’ and ‘cling’

• Also a tentative attitude: the onion can form a ‘wedding-ring,/if you like’

What are the critics on Duffy?

Liz Croft:

• ‘Duffy’s outlook is generally life-enchancing’

• Duffy’s poetry presents an ‘optimistic view of the redeeming power of love’

Ian Sampson:

• Her poetry contains a ‘medley of marginalised voices’

• ‘Duffy only rarely achieves a careful balance between satire and sympathy’

Jodey Allen-Randolph:

• ‘Failure, loneliness, isolation and emptiness haunt her verse’

• ‘Duffy shares Larkin’s tragic view of life’

Michael Woods: ‘Duffy’s poems explore how time is inevitably cruel and takes things away from us’.

Carol Ann Duffy: ‘I have little in common with Larkin’

Charlotte Runcie: ‘Duffy has the ability to drill deep into the core of the most complex human experiences’

What are the critics on Larkin?

Liz Croft:

• ‘Larkin has come to be described a “morose”

• Larkin implies that ‘love is impotent’

• ‘Larkin seems to be saying that fantasy is preferable to reality, even if that fantasy cannot last’

• Larkin implies that ‘love is impotent’

Grey Geddes:

• ‘Larkin is the poet of the emotionally under-privileged’

• ‘He is an intelligent sceptic rather than a shallow cynic or bitter loser.'

David Punter: ‘At the end of the poems we often sense a vaccum, an abyss’

Phillip Larkin: ‘The poet is really engaged in recreating the familiar’

Byran Appleyard: ‘Larkin is a hopeless and inflexible pessimist’

Andrew Motion: ‘He is so often regarded as an unreservedly pessimistic poet’

Michael Woods:

• ‘Larkin’s poetry is a poetry of self-mockery’

• ‘He evokes feelings of concern in terms of the conventional pattern of life: marriage and children impacting on the character’s freedom.’

Helen Regan:

• ‘Larkin articulates a sense of disappointment that life hasn’t delivered much’

• ‘In the collection, there is a vivid rendering of the changing social texture and a sustained interest in the value of its citizens.’