Abstract
Barbara Everett’s essay ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’ (1980) marks the anno domini of Larkin studies.1 Before her intervention the critical lexicon – largely, but not exclusively, the creation of Larkin detractors – had been dominated by descriptors like ‘middlebrow’, ‘suburban’, ‘provincial’, ‘genteel’, ‘middle-class’ and ‘defeatist’. Charles Tomlinson began his 1961 essay ‘Poetry Today’, in the seventh volume of the highly influential Pelican Guide to English Literature:
Over forty years ago two Americans and an Irishman attempted to put English poetry back into the mainstream of European Culture. The effect of those generations who have succeeded to the heritage of Eliot, Pound and Yeats has been largely to squander the awareness these three gave us of our place in world literature, and to retreat into a self-congratulatory parochialism.2
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Notes
Barbara Everett, ‘Philip Larkin: After Symbolism’, Essays in Criticism, XXX (1980), 227–42.
Charles Tomlinson, ‘Poetry Today’, Pelican Guide to English Literature, vol. 7, The Modern Period, ed. Boris Ford (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1964), 458.
Andrew Swarbrick, ‘The Less Deceived’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ by Philip Larkin (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1986), 73.
Hugh Kenner, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1988), 240.
My phrasing here is indebted to Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (Polity, London, 2003), 41.
I drew this connection from Roger Craik’s fascinating essay ‘Some Unheard Melodies in Philip Larkin’s Poetry’, About Larkin, 12 (2001), 11–13.
Roman Jakobson, A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn (Arnold, London, 1998), 109.
Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (Faber, London, 1969), 96, 72, 65.
Robert Conquest, ‘A Proper Sport’, Larkin at Sixty (Faber, London, 1982), 32.
B.C. Southam, A Student’s Guide to the ‘Selected Poems’ of T.S. Eliot (Faber, London, 1994), 79.
Alfred Tennyson, The poems of Alfred Tennyson (Kegan Paul, London, 1882), 28.
John Betjeman, Collected Poems, ed. Earl of Birkenhead (John Murray, London, 1958), 213.
Jean Hartley, Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press, and Me (Carcanet, Manchester, 1989), 119.
Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002), 2.
John Newsinger, ‘Dead Poet: the Larkin Letters’, Race and Class, vol. 34, no. 4 (1993), 87.
Martin Luther King, ‘I have a dream’, The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches, ed. Brian MacArthur (Viking, London, 1995), 491.
Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971–2001 (Faber, London, 2002), 95, 79–80, 94.
Peter Hollindale, ‘Philip Larkin’s “The Explosion”’, Critical Survey, I (1989), 142.
John Ashbery, April Galleons (Carcanet, Manchester, 1987), 14.
William Wootten, ‘In the Graveyard of Verse’, London Review of Books, 9 August 2001, 24.
Ronald Draper, ‘The Positive Larkin’, Critical Essays on Philip Larkin: The Poems, eds Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey (Longman, London, 1989), 103–4.
Marcus Cunliffe, The Literature of the United States (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1964), 148.
Lewis Carroll, The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll (Chancellor Press, London, 1982), 818.
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© 2008 John Osborne
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Osborne, J. (2008). Larkin and Modernism: Poetry. In: Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598935_3
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