critical voices

Question 1

Nick Johnston Jones

Answer 1

“the poetic persona may vary between poems, but solitude and separation are common figure”

Question 2

James Naremore

Answer 2

“Larkin seldom presents himself as anything but the onlooker”

Question 3

Andrew Swarbrick LEARN

Answer 3

“His writing is driven by a sense of failure in both”

Question 4

Andrew Swarbrick (pt2) LEARN

Answer 4

“At the centre of Larkin’s poetry is their pursuit of definition, a self which feels threatened by the proximity of others but which fears that without relationships with otherness the self has no validity”

Question 5

John Boyley - Afternoons

Answer 5

“wholly in keeping with the drab, diminished, unillusioned spirit of post war Britain’s, a poet of low keyed vernacular honestly, whose every line seemed to be saying - come off of it”

Question 6

Roma Shrestha LEARN

Answer 6

“Larkins poetry often takes an unsentimental look at love, frequently presenting it as little more than a biological mechanism to ensure the human races reproduction”

Question 7

John Betjeman LEARN

Answer 7

“the laureate of the housing estates”

Question 8

Terry Eagleton LEARN

Answer 8

“A death- obsessed, emotionally-retarded misanthropist who had the impudence to generalise his own fears and failings to the way things are”

Question 9

I. D. McCatchy

Answer 9

Larkin wrote in “clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, shouted stunted lives and spoiled desires”