Abstract
In ‘Posterity’, Larkin pretends to construct his own epitaph. Its ostensible joke is that the poem’s speaker will be posthumously saddled with an uncomprehending American biographer, just as the American will have to tolerate this boring Englishman. Otherwise so different, they are the same in feeling thwarted and forced to settle for second-best. Within this irony, Larkin plays with self-revelation, just as the opening plays with self-referentialism (‘Jake Balokowsky, my biographer,/ Has this page microfilmed’). Balokowsky is in the same tradition as the self-seeking academic in ‘Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses’ and seems paraded mockingly before us as the biographer who will fail to pluck out the heart of the poet’s mystery, getting only as far as the uncomprehending intemperateness of ‘Oh, you know the thing … One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’.
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Notes
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© 1995 Andrew Swarbrick
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Swarbrick, A. (1995). Larkin’s Identities. In: Out of Reach. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24061-6_7
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