PHILIP LARKIN

PHILIP LARKIN

Philip Larkin is a brilliant representative of the post- modernist poetry, and his "essential criticism of modernism" refers to the contradiction which exists between its technique and reality. Larkin was the second child in a middle- class family and had a normal childhood marked by a propensity for literature, a possible influence of his father. He continued his studies at St. John's College at Oxford and he decided to read for a degree in English Literature and Language. He left Oxford in 1943 and his first try at home was o work in prose, actually a novel, Jill- a result of his experience in the Oxford wartime. Meanwhile he was also writing poems gathered in two volumes before his first novel Jill had been published: Poetry from Oxford in Wartime 1944 and The North Ship in 1945; the novel would appear a year later, 1946. He did not stop writing novels and Jill was followed by A Girl in Winter illustrating his life as a librarian. Unfortunately neither Jill nor A Girl in Winter was a success.

As a poet Larkin did not manage to avoid the influence of other poets on him. The North Ship is a volume written under the influence of Yeats. The musicality of his verse impressed Larkin who tried to write like Yeats in a moment of enthusiasm. This volume is generally associated with "self- conscious lyricism" - Roger Bowen. Larkin's movement is an evolution, a development from youth and early Romanticism to a "less deceived" maturity in The Less Deceived (1955). Beginning with this volume and going on with The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) also called "mature volumes" a certain tension between Larkin's new irony and his concern for beauty is evoked. The Whitsun Weddings tries a more optimistic note than the previous work and it is considered an optimistic volume. The last "mature volume", High Windows follows and develops the direction proposed in the previous volume the title is an obvious reference to light and freedom, limited by the epithet "high" which symbolizes a particular freedom, actually Larkin's vision of transcendence and the poet's struggle to transcend since "high" also implies difficulty in attaining it.

The first person speaking in Larkin's poems is and is not identical with Larkin. Levi Peter states that "the speaker is not really Philip, but related to him at several points". Most of Larkin's poems attest to the existence of a split personality first by his attitude towards life being at the same time ironic, clever and sensitive. The poem Church Going aims at the exploration of the self. The word "church" in the title supposes a double attitude towards it, an aesthetic one or / and a religious one which can unconsciously exist. The second word implies a slight idea of becoming therefore movement, changing and "church going" makes of any person more than just an observer of the external environment but an observer of inner transformation. The first stanza is a glib ironic presentation in short phrase of a church or "another church", syntagm which suggests that all the churches are identical. His first perception is of material aspect, which is a temporary one as the words "sprawling", "cut" and "brownish" suggest. Yet, there is another important unseen presence, which annihilates the first part of the stanza as insignificant, which is permanent and unchangeable: "a tense, musty, unignorable silence".

Larkin's irony is not always based on ignorance as in the previous poem but it acquires and educational I forming aim in Born Yesterday. His conspicuous irony veils a very serious personality that manifests against pomposity and foolish sentimentality stressing the unavoidable loneliness of life.

Through his poetry Larkin shows us the common things and ordinary life can be poetic as well as transient, materiality is a good host for a spiritual transcendent silence in Church Going. Larkin's aim should be to rescue experience from the passage of time: "I write about experiences, which somehow acquire some sort of meaning for me."

Death is the main character in the famous gloomy poem Aubade strangely contrasting with the title which means a piece sang or play outdoors at dawn, usually as a compliment to someone. Aubade is a buoyant term connected with dawn which can be symbol for beginning but Larkin makes us understand that any beginning has an end that life is a flash on the dark background of death or as he says "soundless dark" means silence. This kind of absence is an obsessive presence in human being's mind:

"Walking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify."

With Larkin death means also lack of time and space, it repeals any relativity being an absolute and endless absence: "Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere". Actually he fears this absence and the idea of becoming absence, a permanent absence since being unchangeable, unpredictable, unknown and unseen it is infinite. He as well as any human being knows that he "can't escape" yet he "can't accept". In the last stanza light strengthens, there is a new beginning which has to end in another night, also suggests that the continuous oscillation between day and night is similar to the alternation between life and death. There is an ambiguous line in this stanza: "one side will have to go" which may refer to the separation between material and spiritual noticing that only "one side" is transient while the other can remain after death- or to the fact that every day means another step towards death. The "one side" which supposes the experience of the "other side" makes of the poem a less pessimistic one; even the ending night is not only a description of a day routine but a slight hope shows up when the "world begins to rouse" a specific structure based on a lack of equilibrium between positive and negative parts of the poems characterizes Larkin's poetry and avoid any radical placement of it to one or another extremity. A similar example is the poem An Arundel Tomb which closes with the line "What will survive is love".

If Audabe defines death as an absence in The Building, a poem referring to the hospital- very much connected with death- Larkin never names the building as a hospital although he realize a minute description. The poet avoids the words hospital and ambulances and their absence stresses "the sense of fear and the unknown". With Larkin man is giving a strange, difficult life, which does not allow any knowledge. Life's sadness, irony, loneliness make it absurd and unbearable; its only hope seems to be transcendence through love.