Philip Larkin: Reasons for Attendance

Abstract

If John Betjeman ‘knocked over the “No Road Through to Real Life” signs’,1 then among the major poets of the second half of this century his immediate heir is Philip Larkin, whose fundamental concern, like Betjeman, is human life lived within contemporary British society. Although not a preservationist in the obviously public way that John Betjeman was, Larkin is equally committed to the defence of an environment which reflects the good society’s respect for human scale and values, and to a balance between the urban and the rural. In ‘Going, Going’, for instance, from High Windows, he registers a sense of both bitterness and panic at the rate at which the countryside is being obliterated by highrise blocks and motorways: