Critical Quotes

Question 1

Motion (Relationships)

Answer 1

‘Larkin particularly explores the gap between that he expects of love and what it provides.’

Question 2

Motion (Appearances)

Answer 2

‘Larkin… sees through appearances at the same time as he seizes them’

Question 3

Regan (The Movement)

Answer 3

‘The Movement is defined in terms of lost idealism and a vigilant readjustment to an unsettled post war England.’

Question 4

Enright (The Movement)

Answer 4

‘Honesty of thought and feeling and clarity of expression.’

Question 5

Regan (Attitudes)

Answer 5

The attitudes in the poem range from cynical outrage to plangent melancholy, while the language and syntax modulate between the colloquial and the lyrical.

Question 6

Regan (Encompasses)

Answer 6

‘Many of Larkin’s poems move towards a generalising statement which encompasses ‘all of us’, and yet the poetry cannot entirely efface the deep divisions which continue to operate in post war society.’

Question 7

Regan (Social Texture)

Answer 7

‘In the range of poems in Whitsun Weddings there is ‘a vivid rendering of the changing social texture and a sustained interest in the changing values of its citizens.’

Question 8

Regan (Society and Language)

Answer 8

‘But ‘the poems are not simply a reflection’ of society, but a selective re-ordering or re-presentation of its surfaces… a particular version of events … a complete and unified picture of society is revealed as an impossible task beyond the capacity of language.’

Question 9

Punter (Realisation)

Answer 9

‘Many of Larkins poems… seem to be attempts to realise something but with very great difficulty, we do not receive only the conclusions but the whole process of reflection.’