John Betjeman
1906–1984
John Betjeman, poet laureate of England from 1972 until his death in 1984, was known by many as a poet whose writing evoked a sense of nostalgia. He utilized traditional poetic forms, wrote with a light touch about public issues, celebrated classic architecture, and satirized much of contemporary society for his perception of its superficiality. "Modern 'progress' is anathema to him . . . ," Jocelyn Brooke wrote in Ronald Firbank and John Betjeman prior to Betjeman's death: "though fortunately for us [he] is still able to laugh." Brooke continued: "Perhaps [Betjeman] can best be described as a writer who uses the medium of light verse for a serious purpose: not merely as a vehicle for satire or social commentary, but as a means of expressing a peculiar and specialized form of aesthetic emotion, in which nostalgia and humour are about equally blended."
Betjeman's poetry was considered something of a "phenomenon"; it was read by a large audience and was also praised by literary critics. As Ralph J. Mills pointed out in Descant, "Betjeman is a phenomenon in contemporary English literature, a truly popular poet. The sudden fame won by his Collected Poems . . . brought him a wide reputation and made him quickly into a public personality." Betjeman was also admired by such poets and critics as Edmund Wilson and W. H. Auden, who dedicated his own The Age of Anxiety to his fellow poet. "Certainly it is very rare in our day to see much accord between distinguished critics and poets on the one hand and the general public on the other," Mills would add; "but the very complexity of Betjeman's personality and feelings beneath the skillful though apparently simple surface of his verse probably unites, in whatever different kinds of levels of appreciation, the otherwise remote members of his audience."
1958's Collected Poems first brought Betjeman into the popular limelight. Displaying the poet's skillful use of nineteenth-century poetic models, the collection was enthusiastically received by many critics. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer, for example, stated that Betjeman's poems were "a pleasant change from the shapeless and unarticulated matter . . . offered us by so many of his contemporaries. For Mr. Betjeman is a born versifier, ingenious and endlessly original; his echoes of Tennyson and Crabb, Praed and Father Prout, are never mere pastiche; and he is always attentive to the sound of his words, the run of his lines, the shape of his stanzas." T. J. Ross, however, found that although "his ear is as flawless as Tennyson's and his effects sometimes as remarkable, Betjeman creates a world which, unlike the Victorians', is a miniature." Ross believed that when Betjeman involved the reader completely with his subject "the result [was] poor." Only when he kept the reader at a distance did he bring his work up to the level of "first-rate minor art." But Louise Bogan had high praise for Betjeman's work: "His verse forms, elaborately varied, reproduce an entire set of neglected Victorian techniques, which he manipulates with the utmost dexterity and taste. His diction and his observation are delightfully fresh and original. And it is a pleasure to let down our defenses and be swept along by his anapaestic lines, with their bouncing unstressed syllables, and to meet no imperfect or false rhymes in the process; to recognize sentiment so delicately shaded, so sincerely felt, that it becomes immediately acceptable even to our modern sensibilities, grown used to the harsh, the violent, and the horrifying."
In Summoned by Bells, Betjeman recreates his personal past in richly-detailed poems. Because the poet was able to recreate so accurately the time and place of his own childhood, Mills attributed to Betjeman "an almost Proustian memory." Walter Allen, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called Summoned by Bells an autobiography. But the collection, Allen explained, "can't be judged simply as the equivalent of an autobiographical novel. Whatever the final verdict on it may be, it is an extraordinarily accomplished, sustained exercise in narrative verse." Philip Larkin, in his review of the book for the Spectator, found that, although all the poems in the collection tell the poet's life story, Betjeman "is not an egoist: rather, he is that rare thing, an extrovert sensitive. . . . [Time] and again in scenes where interest might be expected to focus on the author's feelings we find it instead shifting to the details." Larkin concludes that "Betjeman has an astonishing command of detail, both visual and circumstantial."
The poems from both High and Low and A Nip in the Air were included in the fourth edition of Betjeman's Collected Poems. Larkin, writing in his introduction to the volume, explained that Betjeman was a difficult poet for many critics to approach. "Betjeman," he explained, "constitutes a kind of distorting mirror in which all our critical catch-phrases appear in gross unacceptable parody. He is committed, ambiguous, and ironic; he is conscious of literary tradition (but quotes the wrong authors); he is a satirist (but on the wrong side); he has his own White Goddess (in blazer and shorts). And he has done all those things such as forging a personal utterance, creating a private myth, bringing a new language and new properties to poetry, and even . . . giving poetry back to the general reader, all equally undeniably, yet none of them in quite the way we meant. No wonder our keen critical tools twitch fretfully at his approach."
Additional verses, which Betjeman had chosen to omit from previous volumes and which some critics noted were of uneven quality, were collected as Uncollected Poems. This work was published in 1982, two years before the poet's death. While noting in a review of the work for the London Sunday Times that Uncollected Poems contained some "duds," John Carey added that it also included "poems no sensible reader will miss. The best of them touch on dying, that undying Betjeman bug-bear. Whatever his relations with contemporary life, he is unchallengeably the laureate of contemporary death, and has traced, in poem after poem, its horribly normal advance from the preliminary twinge . . . to the fatal X-ray photographs and the hospital bed, conveniently placed for you to hear your relatives, in the car park below, making off cheerily to tea and telly."
A sociable man who developed numerous close friendships with a variety of people over the years, Betjeman wrote many letters. His voluminous correspondence was collected in the two-volume Letters, published posthumously beginning in 1994. Edited by his daughter, Candida Lycett Green, Letters traces the poet's life through two periods: 1926 through 1951, and 1951 through 1984, the year of Betjeman's death. "Somewhere in these two thick volumes," friend and critic Mark Girouard commented in the Times Literary Supplement, "John Betjeman remarks that he wrote letters in order to avoid writing poems. . . . To write letters . . . so that the reading of them brings the writer into the room with one, is a rare gift, but Betjeman certainly had it."
In the London Review of Books, Patricia Beer commented on the element of humor that runs throughout the collected Letters. Listing the poet's "apparatus of mirth" as "Oirish imitations, babytalk, spoof signatures, rustic voices, rebus writing, caricatures, doodles and so on," Beer noted that "it too often sounds as though it needed oiling. . . Some will in any case find the jollity very much to their taste. Those who do not will have many and various sorts of seriousness, even melancholy, to choose from in this protean collection."
Besides writing and editing several works on architecture, throughout his life Betjeman remained passionately involved in architectural preservation efforts. As he told Willa Petschek, he was most interested "in saving groups of buildings of towns that can be ruined by 'a single frightful store that looks like a drive-in movie. The only way to prevent more and more ugly buildings going up . . . is to draw people's attention to what's good in all periods.'" Betjeman made numerous appearances on television to promote preservation and became, as Petschek maintained, "a cherished national cult."
Betjeman championed such causes in his poetry as well; he wrote lovingly of the places of his childhood, of the buildings and monuments in danger of destruction. "Betjeman's approach to architecture (which he values second only to poetry) enabled him to recognize the 'living force' of 19th-century buildings, especially the Victorian Gothic," Petschek noted. "Partly through his verse and topographical writings, his guidebooks, poetry readings and TV appearances, but also through his warmth and peculiar genius for imparting enthusiasm for everything from rood screens to ladies' legs, he has made the public accept a rapid reversal in taste."
Tuesday 31 January 2012
Philip Larkin A Biography
Philip Larkin
1922–1985
Philip Larkin, an eminent writer in postwar Great Britain, was commonly referred to as "England's other Poet Laureate" until his death in 1985. Indeed, when the position of laureate became vacant in 1984, many poets and critics favored Larkin's appointment, but the shy, provincial author preferred to avoid the limelight. An "artist of the first rank" in the words of Southern Review contributor John Press, Larkin achieved acclaim on the strength of an extremely small body of work—just over one hundred pages of poetry in four slender volumes that appeared at almost decade-long intervals. These collections, especially The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows, present "a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people, can take comfort and delight," according to X. J. Kennedy in the New Criterion. Larkin employed the traditional tools of poetry—rhyme, stanza, and meter—to explore the often uncomfortable or terrifying experiences thrust upon common people in the modern age. As Alan Brownjohn notes in Philip Larkin, the poet produced without fanfare "the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any English poet in the last twenty-five years."
Despite his wide popularity, Larkin "shied from publicity, rarely consented to interviews or readings, cultivated his image as right-wing curmudgeon and grew depressed at his fame," according to J. D. McClatchy in the New York Times Book Review. To support himself, he worked as a professional librarian for more than forty years, writing in his spare time. In that manner he authored two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, two collections of criticism, All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1968 and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, and all of his verse. Phoenix contributor Alun R. Jones suggests that, as a wage earner at the remote University of Hull, Larkin "avoided the literary, the metropolitan, the group label, and embraced the nonliterary, the provincial, and the purely personal." In Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction, Peter R. King likewise commends "the scrupulous awareness of a man who refuses to be taken in by inflated notions of either art or life." From his base in Hull, Larkin composed poetry that both reflects the dreariness of postwar provincial England and voices "most articulately and poignantly the spiritual desolation of a world in which men have shed the last rags of religious faith that once lent meaning and hope to human lives," according to Press. McClatchy notes Larkin wrote "in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires." Critics feel that this localization of focus and the colloquial language used to describe settings and emotions endear Larkin to his readers. Agenda reviewer George Dekker notes that no living poet "can equal Larkin on his own ground of the familiar English lyric, drastically and poignantly limited in its sense of any life beyond, before or after, life today in England."
Throughout his life, England was Larkin's emotional territory to an eccentric degree. The poet distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry. He also tried to avoid the cliches of his own culture, such as the tendency to read portent into an artist's childhood. In his poetry and essays, Larkin remembered his early years as "unspent" and "boring," as he grew up the son of a city treasurer in Coventry. Poor eyesight and stuttering plagued Larkin as a youth; he retreated into solitude, read widely, and began to write poetry as a nightly routine. In 1940 he enrolled at Oxford, beginning "a vital stage in his personal and literary development," according to Bruce K. Martin in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. At Oxford Larkin studied English literature and cultivated the friendship of those who shared his special interests, including Kingsley Amis and John Wain. He graduated with first class honors in 1943, and, having to account for himself with the wartime Ministry of Labor, he took a position as librarian in the small Shropshire town of Wellington. While there he wrote both of his novels as well as The North Ship, his first volume of poetry. After working at several other university libraries, Larkin moved to Hull in 1955 and began a thirty-year association with the library at the University of Hull. He is still admired for his expansion and modernization of that facility.
The author's Selected Letters, edited by Larkin's longtime friend Anthony Thwaite, reveals much about the writer's personal and professional life between 1940 and 1985. Washington Post Book World reviewer John Simon notes that the letters are "about intimacy, conviviality, and getting things off one's heaving chest into a heedful ear." He suggests that "these cheerful, despairing, frolicsome, often foul-mouthed, grouchy, self-assertive and self-depreciating missives should not be missed by anyone who appreciates Larkin's verse."
In a Paris Review interview, Larkin dismissed the notion that he studied the techniques of poets that he admired in order to perfect his craft. Most critics feel, however, that the poems of both William Butler Yeats and Thomas Hardy exerted an influence on Larkin as he sought his own voice. Martin suggests that the pieces in The North Ship "reflect an infatuation with Yeatsian models, a desire to emulate the Irishman's music without having undergone the experience upon which it had been based." Hardy's work provided the main impetus to Larkin's mature poetry, according to critics. A biographer in Contemporary Literary Criticism claims "Larkin credited his reading of Thomas Hardy's verse for inspiring him to write with greater austerity and to link experiences and emotions with detailed settings." King contends that a close reading of Hardy taught Larkin "that a modern poet could write about the life around him in the language of the society around him. He encouraged [Larkin] to use his poetry to examine the reality of his own life. . . . As a result Larkin abandoned the highly romantic style of The North Ship, which had been heavily influenced by the poetry of Yeats, and set out to write from the tensions that underlay his own everyday experiences. Hardy also supported his employment of traditional forms and technique, which Larkin [went] on to use with subtlety and variety." In his work Philip Larkin, Martin also claims that Larkin learned from Hardy "that his own life, with its often casual discoveries, could become poems, and that he could legitimately share such experience with his readers. From this lesson [came Larkin's] belief that a poem is better based on something from 'unsorted' experience than on another poem or other art."
Not surprisingly, this viewpoint allied Larkin with the poets of The Movement, a loose association of British writers who "called, implicitly in their poetry and fiction and explicitly in critical essays, for some sort of commonsense return to more traditional techniques," according to Martin in Philip Larkin. Martin adds that the rationale for this "antimodernist, antiexperimental stance is their stated concern with clarity: with writing distinguished by precision rather than obscurity. . . . [The Movement urged] not an abandonment of emotion, but a mixture of rationality with feeling, of objective control with subjective abandon. Their notion of what they felt the earlier generation of writers, particularly poets, lacked, centered around the ideas of honesty and realism about self and about the outside world." King observes that Larkin "had sympathy with many of the attitudes to poetry represented by The Movement," but this view of the poet's task antedated the beginnings of that group's influence. Nonetheless, in the opinion of Washington Post Book World contributor Chad Walsh, Larkin says "seemed to fulfill the credo of the Movement better than anyone else, and he was often singled out, as much for damnation as for praise, by those looking for the ultimate Movement poet." Brownjohn concludes that in the company of The Movement, Larkin's own "distinctive technical skills, the special subtlety in his adaptation of a very personal colloquial mode to the demands of tight forms, were not immediately seen to be outstanding; but his strengths as a craftsman have increasingly come to be regarded as one of the hallmarks of his talent."
Those strengths of craftsmanship and technical skill in Larkin's mature works receive almost universal approval from literary critics. London Sunday Times correspondent Ian Hamilton writes: "Supremely among recent poets, [Larkin] was able to accommodate a talking voice to the requirements of strict metres and tight rhymes, and he had a faultless ear for the possibilities of the iambic line." David Timms expresses a similar view in his book entitled Philip Larkin. Technically, notes Timms, Larkin was "an extraordinarily various and accomplished poet, a poet who [used] the devices of metre and rhyme for specific effects. . . . His language is never flat, unless he intends it to be so for a particular reason, and his diction is never stereotyped. He [was] always ready . . . to reach across accepted literary boundaries for a word that will precisely express what he intends." As King explains, Larkin's best poems "are rooted in actual experiences and convey a sense of place and situation, people and events, which gives an authenticity to the thoughts that are then usually raised by the poet's observation of the scene. . . . Joined with this strength of careful social observation is a control over tone changes and the expression of developing feelings even within a single poem . . . which is the product of great craftsmanship. To these virtues must be added the fact that in all the poems there is a lucidity of language which invites understanding even when the ideas expressed are paradoxical or complex." New Leader contributor Pearl K. Bell concludes that Larkin's poetry "fits with unresisting precision into traditional structures, . . . filling them with the melancholy truth of things in the shrunken, vulgarized and parochial England of the 1970s."
If Larkin's style is traditional, the subject matter of his poetry is derived exclusively from modern life. Press contends that Larkin's artistic work "delineates with considerable force and delicacy the pattern of contemporary sensibility, tracing the way in which we respond to our environment, plotting the ebb and flow of the emotional flux within us, embodying in his poetry attitudes of heart and mind that seem peculiarly characteristic of our time: doubt, insecurity, boredom, aimlessness and malaise." A sense that life is a finite prelude to oblivion underlies many of Larkin's poems. King suggests that the work is "a poetry of disappointment, of the destruction of romantic illusions, of man's defeat by time and his own inadequacies," as well as a study of how dreams, hopes, and ideals "are relentlessly diminished by the realities of life." To Larkin, Brownjohn notes, life was never "a matter of blinding revelations, mystical insights, expectations glitteringly fulfilled. Life, for Larkin, and, implicitly, for all of us, is something lived mundanely, with a gradually accumulating certainty that its golden prizes are sheer illusion." Love is one of the supreme deceptions of humankind in Larkin's worldview, as King observes: "Although man clutches at his instinctive belief that only love will comfort, console and sustain him, such a hope is doomed to be denied. A lover's promise is an empty promise and the power to cure suffering through love is a tragic illusion." Stanley Poss in Western Humanities Review maintains that Larkin's poems demonstrate "desperate clarity and restraint and besieged common sense. And what they mostly say is, be beginning to despair, despair, despair."
Larkin arrived at his conclusions candidly, concerned to expose evasions so that the reader might stand "naked but honest, 'less deceived' . . . before the realities of life and death," to quote King. Many critics find Larkin withdrawn from his poems, a phenomenon Martin describes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography thus: "The unmarried observer, a staple in Larkin's poetic world, . . . enjoys only a curious and highly limited kind of communion with those he observes." Jones likewise declares that Larkin's "ironic detachment is comprehensive. Even the intense beauty that his poetry creates is created by balancing on a keen ironic edge." King writes: "A desire not to be fooled by time leads to a concern to maintain vigilance against a whole range of possible evasions of reality. It is partly this which makes Larkin's typical stance one of being to one side of life, watching himself and others with a detached eye." Although Harvard Advocate contributor Andrew Sullivan states that the whole tenor of Larkin's work is that of an "irrelevant and impotent spectator," John Reibetanz offers the counter suggestion in Contemporary Literature that the poetry records and reflects "the imperfect, transitory experiences of the mundane reality that the poet shares with his readers." Larkin himself offered a rather wry description of his accomplishments—an assessment that, despite its levity, links him emotionally to his work. In 1979 he told the Observer: "I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any. . . . Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."
Critics such as Dalhousie Review contributor Roger Bowen find moments of affirmation in Larkin's poetry, notwithstanding its pessimistic and cynical bent. According to Bowen, an overview of Larkin's oeuvre makes evident "that the definition of the poet as a modern anti-hero governed by a sense of his own mortality seems . . . justified. But . . . a sense of vision and a quiet voice of celebration seem to be asserting themselves" in at least some of the poems. Brownjohn admits that Larkin's works take a bleak view of human existence; at the same time, however, they contain "the recurrent reflection that others, particularly the young, might still find happiness in expectation." Contemporary Literature essayist James Naremore expands on Larkin's tendency to detach himself from the action in his poems: "From the beginning, Larkin's work has manifested a certain coolness and lack of self-esteem, a need to withdraw from experience; but at the same time it has continued to show his desire for a purely secular type of romance. . . . Larkin is trying to assert his humanity, not deny it. . . . The greatest virtue in Larkin's poetry is not so much his suppression of large poetic gestures as his ability to recover an honest sense of joy and beauty." The New York Times quotes Larkin as having said that a poem "represents the mastering, even if just for a moment, of the pessimism and the melancholy, and enables you—you the poet, and you, the reader—to go on." King senses this quiet catharsis when he concludes: "Although one's final impression of the poetry is certainly that the chief emphasis is placed on a life 'unspent' in the shadow of 'untruth,' moments of beauty and affirmation are not entirely denied. It is the difficulty of experiencing such moments after one has become so aware of the numerous self-deceptions that man practices on himself to avoid the uncomfortable reality which lies at the heart of Larkin's poetic identity."
Timms claims that Larkin "consistently maintained that a poet should write about those things in life that move him most deeply: if he does not feel deeply about anything, he should not write." Dedicated to reaching out for his readers, the poet was a staunch opponent of modernism in all artistic media. Larkin felt that such cerebral experimentation ultimately creates a barrier between an artist and the audience and provides unnecessary thematic complications. Larkin's "demand for fidelity to experience is supported by his insistence that poetry should both communicate and give pleasure to the reader," King notes, adding: "It would be a mistake to dismiss this attitude as a form of simple literary conservatism. Larkin is not so much expressing an anti-intellectualism as attacking a particular form of artistic snobbery." In Philip Larkin, Martin comments that the poet saw the need for poetry to move toward the "paying customer." Therefore, his writings concretize "many of the questions which have perplexed man almost since his beginning but which in modern times have become the province principally of academicians. . . . [Larkin's poetry reflects] his faith in the common reader to recognize and respond to traditional philosophical concerns when stripped of undue abstractions and pretentious labels." Brownjohn finds Larkin eminently successful in his aims: "It is indeed true that many of his readers find pleasure and interest in Larkin's poetry for its apparent accessibility and its cultivation of verse forms that seem reassuringly traditional rather than 'modernist' in respect of rhyme and metre." As Timms succinctly notes, originality for Larkin consisted "not in modifying the medium of communication, but in communicating something different."
"Much that is admirable in the best of [Larkin's] work is felt [in Collected Poems]: firmness and delicacy of cadence, a definite geography, a mutually fortifying congruence between what the language means to say and what it musically embodies," asserts Seamus Heaney in the Observer. The collection contains Larkin's six previous volumes of poetry as well as eighty-three of his unpublished poems gleaned from notebooks and homemade booklets. The earliest poems (which reflect the style and social concerns of W. H. Auden) date from his schooldays and the latest close to his death. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Books, Alan Shapiro points out, "Reading the work in total, we can see how Larkin, early and late, is a poet of great and complex feeling." Larkin "[endowed] the most commonplace objects and occasions with a chilling poignancy, [measuring] daily life with all its tedium and narrowness against the possibilities of feeling," adds Shapiro.
Larkin's output of fiction and essays is hardly more extensive than his poetry. His two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, were both published before his twenty-fifth birthday. New Statesman correspondent Clive James feels that both novels "seem to point forward to the poetry. Taken in their chronology, they are impressively mature and self-sufficient." James adds that the fiction is so strong that "if Larkin had never written a line of verse, his place as a writer would still have been secure." Although the novels received little critical attention when they first appeared, they have since been judged highly successful. Brownjohn calls Jill "one of the better novels written about England during the Second World War, not so much for any conscious documentary effort put into it as for Larkin's characteristic scrupulousness in getting all the background details right." In the New York Review of Books, John Bayley notes that A Girl in Winter is "a real masterpiece, a quietly gripping novel, dense with the humor that is Larkin's trademark, and also an extended prose poem." Larkin's essay collections, Required Writing and All What Jazz, are compilations of critical pieces he wrote for periodicals over a thirty-year period, including the jazz record reviews he penned as a music critic for the London Daily Telegraph. "Everything Larkin writes is concise, elegant and wholly original," Bayley claims in the Listener, "and this is as true of his essays and reviews as it is of his poetry." Elsewhere in the New York Review of Books, Bayley comments that Required Writing "reveals wide sympathies, deep and trenchant perceptions, a subterraneous grasp of the whole of European culture." And in an essay on All What Jazz for Anthony Thwaite's Larkin at Sixty, James concludes that "no wittier book of criticism has ever been written."
Larkin stopped writing poetry shortly after his collection High Windows was published in 1974. In an Observer obituary, Kingsley Amis characterized the poet as "a man much driven in upon himself, with increasing deafness from early middle age cruelly emphasizing his seclusion." Small though it is, Larkin's body of work has "altered our awareness of poetry's capacity to reflect the contemporary world," according to London Magazine correspondent Roger Garfitt. A. N. Wilson draws a similar conclusion in the Spectator: "Perhaps the reason Larkin made such a great name from so small an oeuvre was that he so exactly caught the mood of so many of us. . . . Larkin found the perfect voice for expressing our worst fears." That voice was "stubbornly indigenous," according to Robert B. Shaw in Poetry Nation. Larkin appealed primarily to the British sensibility; he remained unencumbered by any compunction to universalize his poems by adopting a less regional idiom. Perhaps as a consequence, his poetry sells remarkably well in Great Britain, his readers come from all walks of life, and his untimely cancer-related death in 1985 has not diminished his popularity. Andrew Sullivan feels that Larkin "has spoken to the English in a language they can readily understand of the profound self-doubt that this century has given them. He was, of all English poets, a laureate too obvious to need official recognition."
In 2002, a notebook containing unpublished poems by Larkin was found in a garbage dump in England, and the notebook's current owner consulted with auction houses in preparation for selling it. The Society of Authors was to look into legal issues involved in the matter. Then in 2004 came publication of another Collected Poems, again edited by Thwaite. While the first Collected Poems from 1989 was arranged chronologically, this was not the order that Larkin himself had used when first publishing them. Additionally, Thwaite published previously unpublished poems and fragments in the earlier volume, drawing some criticism from Larkin scholars. With the 2004 Collected Poems, such matters were corrected. One hundred pages shorter than the earlier volume, and ordered to Larkin's original desires, this second version "does give the verse itself a better shake," according to John Updike writing in the New Yorker. Yet it is hard to please everyone, as Melanie Rehak noted in a Nation review. "Just as some quibbled when Thwaite diverged from Larkin's chosen path in his previous collection," Rehak noted, "there are absences in this new edition that also diminish it." However, for Daniel Torday, reviewing the second Collected Poems in Esquire, the book was a success. "Twenty years after [Larkin's] death," wrote Torday, "a newly revised [version]...has arrived to remind us that Larkin was more the man's poet of the 20th century than [Charles] Bukowski or [Jack] Kerouac." Torday also felt that Larkin was able to ignore "any audience but himself.... That crass, stubborn, and yet unavoidably lovable curmudgeon who tends to poke his head out at the most inopportune times."
1922–1985
Philip Larkin, an eminent writer in postwar Great Britain, was commonly referred to as "England's other Poet Laureate" until his death in 1985. Indeed, when the position of laureate became vacant in 1984, many poets and critics favored Larkin's appointment, but the shy, provincial author preferred to avoid the limelight. An "artist of the first rank" in the words of Southern Review contributor John Press, Larkin achieved acclaim on the strength of an extremely small body of work—just over one hundred pages of poetry in four slender volumes that appeared at almost decade-long intervals. These collections, especially The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows, present "a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people, can take comfort and delight," according to X. J. Kennedy in the New Criterion. Larkin employed the traditional tools of poetry—rhyme, stanza, and meter—to explore the often uncomfortable or terrifying experiences thrust upon common people in the modern age. As Alan Brownjohn notes in Philip Larkin, the poet produced without fanfare "the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any English poet in the last twenty-five years."
Despite his wide popularity, Larkin "shied from publicity, rarely consented to interviews or readings, cultivated his image as right-wing curmudgeon and grew depressed at his fame," according to J. D. McClatchy in the New York Times Book Review. To support himself, he worked as a professional librarian for more than forty years, writing in his spare time. In that manner he authored two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, two collections of criticism, All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1968 and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, and all of his verse. Phoenix contributor Alun R. Jones suggests that, as a wage earner at the remote University of Hull, Larkin "avoided the literary, the metropolitan, the group label, and embraced the nonliterary, the provincial, and the purely personal." In Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction, Peter R. King likewise commends "the scrupulous awareness of a man who refuses to be taken in by inflated notions of either art or life." From his base in Hull, Larkin composed poetry that both reflects the dreariness of postwar provincial England and voices "most articulately and poignantly the spiritual desolation of a world in which men have shed the last rags of religious faith that once lent meaning and hope to human lives," according to Press. McClatchy notes Larkin wrote "in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires." Critics feel that this localization of focus and the colloquial language used to describe settings and emotions endear Larkin to his readers. Agenda reviewer George Dekker notes that no living poet "can equal Larkin on his own ground of the familiar English lyric, drastically and poignantly limited in its sense of any life beyond, before or after, life today in England."
Throughout his life, England was Larkin's emotional territory to an eccentric degree. The poet distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry. He also tried to avoid the cliches of his own culture, such as the tendency to read portent into an artist's childhood. In his poetry and essays, Larkin remembered his early years as "unspent" and "boring," as he grew up the son of a city treasurer in Coventry. Poor eyesight and stuttering plagued Larkin as a youth; he retreated into solitude, read widely, and began to write poetry as a nightly routine. In 1940 he enrolled at Oxford, beginning "a vital stage in his personal and literary development," according to Bruce K. Martin in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. At Oxford Larkin studied English literature and cultivated the friendship of those who shared his special interests, including Kingsley Amis and John Wain. He graduated with first class honors in 1943, and, having to account for himself with the wartime Ministry of Labor, he took a position as librarian in the small Shropshire town of Wellington. While there he wrote both of his novels as well as The North Ship, his first volume of poetry. After working at several other university libraries, Larkin moved to Hull in 1955 and began a thirty-year association with the library at the University of Hull. He is still admired for his expansion and modernization of that facility.
The author's Selected Letters, edited by Larkin's longtime friend Anthony Thwaite, reveals much about the writer's personal and professional life between 1940 and 1985. Washington Post Book World reviewer John Simon notes that the letters are "about intimacy, conviviality, and getting things off one's heaving chest into a heedful ear." He suggests that "these cheerful, despairing, frolicsome, often foul-mouthed, grouchy, self-assertive and self-depreciating missives should not be missed by anyone who appreciates Larkin's verse."
In a Paris Review interview, Larkin dismissed the notion that he studied the techniques of poets that he admired in order to perfect his craft. Most critics feel, however, that the poems of both William Butler Yeats and Thomas Hardy exerted an influence on Larkin as he sought his own voice. Martin suggests that the pieces in The North Ship "reflect an infatuation with Yeatsian models, a desire to emulate the Irishman's music without having undergone the experience upon which it had been based." Hardy's work provided the main impetus to Larkin's mature poetry, according to critics. A biographer in Contemporary Literary Criticism claims "Larkin credited his reading of Thomas Hardy's verse for inspiring him to write with greater austerity and to link experiences and emotions with detailed settings." King contends that a close reading of Hardy taught Larkin "that a modern poet could write about the life around him in the language of the society around him. He encouraged [Larkin] to use his poetry to examine the reality of his own life. . . . As a result Larkin abandoned the highly romantic style of The North Ship, which had been heavily influenced by the poetry of Yeats, and set out to write from the tensions that underlay his own everyday experiences. Hardy also supported his employment of traditional forms and technique, which Larkin [went] on to use with subtlety and variety." In his work Philip Larkin, Martin also claims that Larkin learned from Hardy "that his own life, with its often casual discoveries, could become poems, and that he could legitimately share such experience with his readers. From this lesson [came Larkin's] belief that a poem is better based on something from 'unsorted' experience than on another poem or other art."
Not surprisingly, this viewpoint allied Larkin with the poets of The Movement, a loose association of British writers who "called, implicitly in their poetry and fiction and explicitly in critical essays, for some sort of commonsense return to more traditional techniques," according to Martin in Philip Larkin. Martin adds that the rationale for this "antimodernist, antiexperimental stance is their stated concern with clarity: with writing distinguished by precision rather than obscurity. . . . [The Movement urged] not an abandonment of emotion, but a mixture of rationality with feeling, of objective control with subjective abandon. Their notion of what they felt the earlier generation of writers, particularly poets, lacked, centered around the ideas of honesty and realism about self and about the outside world." King observes that Larkin "had sympathy with many of the attitudes to poetry represented by The Movement," but this view of the poet's task antedated the beginnings of that group's influence. Nonetheless, in the opinion of Washington Post Book World contributor Chad Walsh, Larkin says "seemed to fulfill the credo of the Movement better than anyone else, and he was often singled out, as much for damnation as for praise, by those looking for the ultimate Movement poet." Brownjohn concludes that in the company of The Movement, Larkin's own "distinctive technical skills, the special subtlety in his adaptation of a very personal colloquial mode to the demands of tight forms, were not immediately seen to be outstanding; but his strengths as a craftsman have increasingly come to be regarded as one of the hallmarks of his talent."
Those strengths of craftsmanship and technical skill in Larkin's mature works receive almost universal approval from literary critics. London Sunday Times correspondent Ian Hamilton writes: "Supremely among recent poets, [Larkin] was able to accommodate a talking voice to the requirements of strict metres and tight rhymes, and he had a faultless ear for the possibilities of the iambic line." David Timms expresses a similar view in his book entitled Philip Larkin. Technically, notes Timms, Larkin was "an extraordinarily various and accomplished poet, a poet who [used] the devices of metre and rhyme for specific effects. . . . His language is never flat, unless he intends it to be so for a particular reason, and his diction is never stereotyped. He [was] always ready . . . to reach across accepted literary boundaries for a word that will precisely express what he intends." As King explains, Larkin's best poems "are rooted in actual experiences and convey a sense of place and situation, people and events, which gives an authenticity to the thoughts that are then usually raised by the poet's observation of the scene. . . . Joined with this strength of careful social observation is a control over tone changes and the expression of developing feelings even within a single poem . . . which is the product of great craftsmanship. To these virtues must be added the fact that in all the poems there is a lucidity of language which invites understanding even when the ideas expressed are paradoxical or complex." New Leader contributor Pearl K. Bell concludes that Larkin's poetry "fits with unresisting precision into traditional structures, . . . filling them with the melancholy truth of things in the shrunken, vulgarized and parochial England of the 1970s."
If Larkin's style is traditional, the subject matter of his poetry is derived exclusively from modern life. Press contends that Larkin's artistic work "delineates with considerable force and delicacy the pattern of contemporary sensibility, tracing the way in which we respond to our environment, plotting the ebb and flow of the emotional flux within us, embodying in his poetry attitudes of heart and mind that seem peculiarly characteristic of our time: doubt, insecurity, boredom, aimlessness and malaise." A sense that life is a finite prelude to oblivion underlies many of Larkin's poems. King suggests that the work is "a poetry of disappointment, of the destruction of romantic illusions, of man's defeat by time and his own inadequacies," as well as a study of how dreams, hopes, and ideals "are relentlessly diminished by the realities of life." To Larkin, Brownjohn notes, life was never "a matter of blinding revelations, mystical insights, expectations glitteringly fulfilled. Life, for Larkin, and, implicitly, for all of us, is something lived mundanely, with a gradually accumulating certainty that its golden prizes are sheer illusion." Love is one of the supreme deceptions of humankind in Larkin's worldview, as King observes: "Although man clutches at his instinctive belief that only love will comfort, console and sustain him, such a hope is doomed to be denied. A lover's promise is an empty promise and the power to cure suffering through love is a tragic illusion." Stanley Poss in Western Humanities Review maintains that Larkin's poems demonstrate "desperate clarity and restraint and besieged common sense. And what they mostly say is, be beginning to despair, despair, despair."
Larkin arrived at his conclusions candidly, concerned to expose evasions so that the reader might stand "naked but honest, 'less deceived' . . . before the realities of life and death," to quote King. Many critics find Larkin withdrawn from his poems, a phenomenon Martin describes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography thus: "The unmarried observer, a staple in Larkin's poetic world, . . . enjoys only a curious and highly limited kind of communion with those he observes." Jones likewise declares that Larkin's "ironic detachment is comprehensive. Even the intense beauty that his poetry creates is created by balancing on a keen ironic edge." King writes: "A desire not to be fooled by time leads to a concern to maintain vigilance against a whole range of possible evasions of reality. It is partly this which makes Larkin's typical stance one of being to one side of life, watching himself and others with a detached eye." Although Harvard Advocate contributor Andrew Sullivan states that the whole tenor of Larkin's work is that of an "irrelevant and impotent spectator," John Reibetanz offers the counter suggestion in Contemporary Literature that the poetry records and reflects "the imperfect, transitory experiences of the mundane reality that the poet shares with his readers." Larkin himself offered a rather wry description of his accomplishments—an assessment that, despite its levity, links him emotionally to his work. In 1979 he told the Observer: "I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any. . . . Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."
Critics such as Dalhousie Review contributor Roger Bowen find moments of affirmation in Larkin's poetry, notwithstanding its pessimistic and cynical bent. According to Bowen, an overview of Larkin's oeuvre makes evident "that the definition of the poet as a modern anti-hero governed by a sense of his own mortality seems . . . justified. But . . . a sense of vision and a quiet voice of celebration seem to be asserting themselves" in at least some of the poems. Brownjohn admits that Larkin's works take a bleak view of human existence; at the same time, however, they contain "the recurrent reflection that others, particularly the young, might still find happiness in expectation." Contemporary Literature essayist James Naremore expands on Larkin's tendency to detach himself from the action in his poems: "From the beginning, Larkin's work has manifested a certain coolness and lack of self-esteem, a need to withdraw from experience; but at the same time it has continued to show his desire for a purely secular type of romance. . . . Larkin is trying to assert his humanity, not deny it. . . . The greatest virtue in Larkin's poetry is not so much his suppression of large poetic gestures as his ability to recover an honest sense of joy and beauty." The New York Times quotes Larkin as having said that a poem "represents the mastering, even if just for a moment, of the pessimism and the melancholy, and enables you—you the poet, and you, the reader—to go on." King senses this quiet catharsis when he concludes: "Although one's final impression of the poetry is certainly that the chief emphasis is placed on a life 'unspent' in the shadow of 'untruth,' moments of beauty and affirmation are not entirely denied. It is the difficulty of experiencing such moments after one has become so aware of the numerous self-deceptions that man practices on himself to avoid the uncomfortable reality which lies at the heart of Larkin's poetic identity."
Timms claims that Larkin "consistently maintained that a poet should write about those things in life that move him most deeply: if he does not feel deeply about anything, he should not write." Dedicated to reaching out for his readers, the poet was a staunch opponent of modernism in all artistic media. Larkin felt that such cerebral experimentation ultimately creates a barrier between an artist and the audience and provides unnecessary thematic complications. Larkin's "demand for fidelity to experience is supported by his insistence that poetry should both communicate and give pleasure to the reader," King notes, adding: "It would be a mistake to dismiss this attitude as a form of simple literary conservatism. Larkin is not so much expressing an anti-intellectualism as attacking a particular form of artistic snobbery." In Philip Larkin, Martin comments that the poet saw the need for poetry to move toward the "paying customer." Therefore, his writings concretize "many of the questions which have perplexed man almost since his beginning but which in modern times have become the province principally of academicians. . . . [Larkin's poetry reflects] his faith in the common reader to recognize and respond to traditional philosophical concerns when stripped of undue abstractions and pretentious labels." Brownjohn finds Larkin eminently successful in his aims: "It is indeed true that many of his readers find pleasure and interest in Larkin's poetry for its apparent accessibility and its cultivation of verse forms that seem reassuringly traditional rather than 'modernist' in respect of rhyme and metre." As Timms succinctly notes, originality for Larkin consisted "not in modifying the medium of communication, but in communicating something different."
"Much that is admirable in the best of [Larkin's] work is felt [in Collected Poems]: firmness and delicacy of cadence, a definite geography, a mutually fortifying congruence between what the language means to say and what it musically embodies," asserts Seamus Heaney in the Observer. The collection contains Larkin's six previous volumes of poetry as well as eighty-three of his unpublished poems gleaned from notebooks and homemade booklets. The earliest poems (which reflect the style and social concerns of W. H. Auden) date from his schooldays and the latest close to his death. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Books, Alan Shapiro points out, "Reading the work in total, we can see how Larkin, early and late, is a poet of great and complex feeling." Larkin "[endowed] the most commonplace objects and occasions with a chilling poignancy, [measuring] daily life with all its tedium and narrowness against the possibilities of feeling," adds Shapiro.
Larkin's output of fiction and essays is hardly more extensive than his poetry. His two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, were both published before his twenty-fifth birthday. New Statesman correspondent Clive James feels that both novels "seem to point forward to the poetry. Taken in their chronology, they are impressively mature and self-sufficient." James adds that the fiction is so strong that "if Larkin had never written a line of verse, his place as a writer would still have been secure." Although the novels received little critical attention when they first appeared, they have since been judged highly successful. Brownjohn calls Jill "one of the better novels written about England during the Second World War, not so much for any conscious documentary effort put into it as for Larkin's characteristic scrupulousness in getting all the background details right." In the New York Review of Books, John Bayley notes that A Girl in Winter is "a real masterpiece, a quietly gripping novel, dense with the humor that is Larkin's trademark, and also an extended prose poem." Larkin's essay collections, Required Writing and All What Jazz, are compilations of critical pieces he wrote for periodicals over a thirty-year period, including the jazz record reviews he penned as a music critic for the London Daily Telegraph. "Everything Larkin writes is concise, elegant and wholly original," Bayley claims in the Listener, "and this is as true of his essays and reviews as it is of his poetry." Elsewhere in the New York Review of Books, Bayley comments that Required Writing "reveals wide sympathies, deep and trenchant perceptions, a subterraneous grasp of the whole of European culture." And in an essay on All What Jazz for Anthony Thwaite's Larkin at Sixty, James concludes that "no wittier book of criticism has ever been written."
Larkin stopped writing poetry shortly after his collection High Windows was published in 1974. In an Observer obituary, Kingsley Amis characterized the poet as "a man much driven in upon himself, with increasing deafness from early middle age cruelly emphasizing his seclusion." Small though it is, Larkin's body of work has "altered our awareness of poetry's capacity to reflect the contemporary world," according to London Magazine correspondent Roger Garfitt. A. N. Wilson draws a similar conclusion in the Spectator: "Perhaps the reason Larkin made such a great name from so small an oeuvre was that he so exactly caught the mood of so many of us. . . . Larkin found the perfect voice for expressing our worst fears." That voice was "stubbornly indigenous," according to Robert B. Shaw in Poetry Nation. Larkin appealed primarily to the British sensibility; he remained unencumbered by any compunction to universalize his poems by adopting a less regional idiom. Perhaps as a consequence, his poetry sells remarkably well in Great Britain, his readers come from all walks of life, and his untimely cancer-related death in 1985 has not diminished his popularity. Andrew Sullivan feels that Larkin "has spoken to the English in a language they can readily understand of the profound self-doubt that this century has given them. He was, of all English poets, a laureate too obvious to need official recognition."
In 2002, a notebook containing unpublished poems by Larkin was found in a garbage dump in England, and the notebook's current owner consulted with auction houses in preparation for selling it. The Society of Authors was to look into legal issues involved in the matter. Then in 2004 came publication of another Collected Poems, again edited by Thwaite. While the first Collected Poems from 1989 was arranged chronologically, this was not the order that Larkin himself had used when first publishing them. Additionally, Thwaite published previously unpublished poems and fragments in the earlier volume, drawing some criticism from Larkin scholars. With the 2004 Collected Poems, such matters were corrected. One hundred pages shorter than the earlier volume, and ordered to Larkin's original desires, this second version "does give the verse itself a better shake," according to John Updike writing in the New Yorker. Yet it is hard to please everyone, as Melanie Rehak noted in a Nation review. "Just as some quibbled when Thwaite diverged from Larkin's chosen path in his previous collection," Rehak noted, "there are absences in this new edition that also diminish it." However, for Daniel Torday, reviewing the second Collected Poems in Esquire, the book was a success. "Twenty years after [Larkin's] death," wrote Torday, "a newly revised [version]...has arrived to remind us that Larkin was more the man's poet of the 20th century than [Charles] Bukowski or [Jack] Kerouac." Torday also felt that Larkin was able to ignore "any audience but himself.... That crass, stubborn, and yet unavoidably lovable curmudgeon who tends to poke his head out at the most inopportune times."
Reading Poetry
As you read the poems independently you should make notes on the poems as you go. Here are five basic questions you should ask yourself about the poems as you read them.
Comment on the look of the poem. What do you notice? Are the lines a similar length? How many lines per stanza? Do the ends of the lines rhyme? Are there any observations you can make about the poem based on your observation of it?
Most poems will have a plot or story line. What is the basic plot or narrative of the poem? And can you identify where the plot changes or develops? Is there a structure to the poem that is linked to the story of the poem? Can you give a title to each of the different sections of the poem?
Comment on the narrative or poetic voice of the poem. Is the voice of the poem the poets' voice? Or is the voice the voice of a character? Is the voice male or female? Young or old? Objective or subjective? Are you sympathetic to the voice or irritated or angry?
Poems will engage with ideas and topics. The poems have been especially chosen because there ideas or topics are linked or are similar to ideas and topics in 'Death of a Salesman' and 'The Go-Between'. What are the topics or ideas that link to the two other texts studied? What is the specific meaning of this poem. And how is this meaning similar or different to the other texts on this course?
Finally you should identify the wide range of different poetic, literary and language techniques the poet has used to communicate their ideas. What are the techniques? And what is the effect of these techniques on you or a generalised reader?
Comment on the look of the poem. What do you notice? Are the lines a similar length? How many lines per stanza? Do the ends of the lines rhyme? Are there any observations you can make about the poem based on your observation of it?
Most poems will have a plot or story line. What is the basic plot or narrative of the poem? And can you identify where the plot changes or develops? Is there a structure to the poem that is linked to the story of the poem? Can you give a title to each of the different sections of the poem?
Comment on the narrative or poetic voice of the poem. Is the voice of the poem the poets' voice? Or is the voice the voice of a character? Is the voice male or female? Young or old? Objective or subjective? Are you sympathetic to the voice or irritated or angry?
Poems will engage with ideas and topics. The poems have been especially chosen because there ideas or topics are linked or are similar to ideas and topics in 'Death of a Salesman' and 'The Go-Between'. What are the topics or ideas that link to the two other texts studied? What is the specific meaning of this poem. And how is this meaning similar or different to the other texts on this course?
Finally you should identify the wide range of different poetic, literary and language techniques the poet has used to communicate their ideas. What are the techniques? And what is the effect of these techniques on you or a generalised reader?
List of Larkin Poems to Read and Understand
Here is the list of poems we will be studying to complete the three texts for the coursework essay.
Mr Bleaney
Love Songs in Age
Faith Healing
The Whitsun Weddings
MCMXIV
Ambulances
Dockery and Son
Wild Oats
An Arundel Tomb
Mr Bleaney
Love Songs in Age
Faith Healing
The Whitsun Weddings
MCMXIV
Ambulances
Dockery and Son
Wild Oats
An Arundel Tomb
Deadlines and Appointments
The draft world literature essay needs to be handed in to me on Friday 3 February by 4.10. However this deadline has been extended to Monday 6 February for a limited number of students.
There will be one to one appointments during the week starting 6 February.
The timetable for these appointments are as follows:
Draft essays to be submitted by Friday 3 February 4.10
If you do not have an appoitment on the 7 or 9 February you do not need to attend the lesson. Normal lessons will resume on 20 February.
There will be one to one appointments during the week starting 6 February.
The timetable for these appointments are as follows:
Draft essays to be submitted by Friday 3 February 4.10
Tuesday 7 February
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10.15 – 10.30
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10.30 – 10.45
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10.45 -11.00
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Ricardo
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11.00 – 11.15
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11.15 - 11.30
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Daniel
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4.10
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Wednesday 8 February
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4.10
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Draft essays to be submitted by Monday 6 February 4.10
Friday 9 February
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1.50 - 2.05
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Janice
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2.05 - 2.20
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2.20 - 2.35
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2.35 - 2.50
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2.50 – 3.05
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If you do not have an appoitment on the 7 or 9 February you do not need to attend the lesson. Normal lessons will resume on 20 February.
Norman's A2 English Literature Deadlines
3000 WORD ESSAY
DEADLINES
Philip Larkin The Whitsun Weddings New £5.19 Used £1.96 from amazon.co.uk
Focus on poems of love, betrayal and disappointment
DEADLINE
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DATE
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Plan
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Monday 5 March
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First draft essay
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Monday 12 March
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Feedback starts
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Monday 19 March
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Feedback completed by
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Wednesday 28 March
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FINAL DEADLINE
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Wednesday 18 April
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Wednesday 25 January 2012
A2 LL Feedback from a Previous Year
I found the contents of this post on a handout I gave out to students a few years ago. I thought it was a good handout so I've posted it to you.
After marking your draft essays I realised there were many similar points I was making on each essay. I suggest you read this handout in conjunction with your essay draft and edit it as soon as possible. You could work on your drafts before we meet for our one to one interview.
- To enable you to write an essay in the right amount of detail, you should answer the essay question with reference to either, two poems per poet or two poems from one poet and one short story or two episodes from two short stories from one author. Your essay must include the work of one poet.
- Remember to write a lot about a little. For every quotation you use try and write at least three relevant comments on the quotation. Your comments must draw from the literary and or linguistic frameworks. This includes commenting on grammar - verbs, nouns & adjectives - lexis, register – formal & formal, syntax – simple, compound and complex sentences, declarative, interrogative, exclamatory and instructional sentences – as well as imagery – metaphor, simile, personification, symbolism and sound techniques such as, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance & onomatopoeia. You can also refer to rhetorical devices such as, contrasting pairs, lists of three, direct address to the reader and repetition. You can also refer to the connotations or associations linked to key words. Remember to always comment on the effects of these techniques on the reader – us. Effects are usually emotional – anger or sympathy for example. Or techniques are used to create a strong impression; they make things stand out for us.
- If you are writing about Heaney or Frost do not write about the voice of the poems as the voice of Heaney of Plath. Refer instead to the poetic voice or narrative voice of the poems. Avoid biographical details of the lives of the poets. But you can write about the poems as having an autobiographical feel about them.
- Remember this is a comparative essay. I think ideally you write about one text in a paragraph. Then using a link sentence write a comparative paragraph to your comparison text. For example you may refer to Heaney’s poetic voice of excitement and enjoyment in nature in one paragraph. And in a second paragraph write about the child character in the Dubliners short stories full of excitement and anticipation. Use a link sentence to connect the two paragraphs showing how one writer is either similar or different to the other. For some of you, you will need to rearrange some of your paragraphs.
- All essays should include a full, detailed and concise introduction. An introduction the title and writers you are going to use, write a brief summary of the plot of short stories or main subject or narrative of the poems. You should state what you intend to compare in your essays be specific, for example, Hughes presents nature as hostile and wild; where as Heaney presents nature at first as exciting and then… . You could outline the main techniques the writers use to communicate their themes.
- Some of you try and communicate complex ideas in complicated sentences. But these can be confusing. Try and break ideas down into simpler sentences.
- Remember the paragraph structure of making a straightforward point, introduce a relevant quotation – by referring to the context of the quotation, quote - a quotation should be a word or a phrase, it should prove the point you want to make and have at least three different comments you can say about it, comment on the quotation – drawing on literary and language frameworks and the effect on us as readers - see bullet point 2.
- Make sure there is a structure to your essay, introduction, main body and conclusion. Write the most important and significant points and comparisons first.
- Make sure you adopt a formal academic register. Avoid colloquial language, buzz words etc.
- Remember to comment on the genre you are writing about – poetry and or prose. Let the examiners know you know about the short story and poetry genres.
· Finally, keep your draft essay. It will need to be submitted with your final essay.
Hope you find this helpful
David
Tuesday 5.30 am
A2 LL - Weak Essays
are characterised by
- descriptive rather than analytical writing
- writing about symbolism without exploring other analytical frameworks first
- paragraphs that don't link specifically to the essay title
- long and complex sentences that often make complex or obscure points
- one or two analytical frameworks only
- fragmented quotations without any context
- a lack of a genuine understanding of the poem
- no topic sentences
- listing ideas without any engagement with quotations
- vague, superficial, general and / or irrelevant comparative points
Sunday 22 January 2012
A2 LL - CONCLUSIONS
A conclusion should include a comment about the two writer's. And a comparative comment about the texts you've just written about. I don't expect you will write anything new in this part of the conclusion.
Secondly you could make an observation about the poets or poems you have written about. It may not be strictly relevant to your essay but you may consider it an interesting and thoughtful observation and this is worth sharing.
Don't worry about a conclusion at this point. Two or three short paragraphs giving an overview of the topics and observations you've made about the topics you've covered will be fine.
Secondly you could make an observation about the poets or poems you have written about. It may not be strictly relevant to your essay but you may consider it an interesting and thoughtful observation and this is worth sharing.
Don't worry about a conclusion at this point. Two or three short paragraphs giving an overview of the topics and observations you've made about the topics you've covered will be fine.
Friday 20 January 2012
A2 LL - Assessment Objectives and Mark Band Criteria
When your essay is marked I will use two mark band descriptors. Below are two lists of Assessment Objectives and Mark Band Descriptions used to mark your essays. Although they are written principally for teachers I think it’s a good idea to assess your own work against the criteria. I’ll put a key explaining some of the technical language used. Clearly the register and lexis is aimed at teachers, and the purpose is to inform.
To be placed in a particular mark band, it is not necessary for a candidate to demonstrate
achievement under every point. Internal assessment should therefore assess a candidate’s work
under the ‘best fit’ principle.
MARK BAND DESCRIPTORS for (AO1)
Select and apply relevant concepts and approaches from integrated linguistic and literary study, using appropriate terminology and accurate, coherent written expression.
Upper Band 4 (26–30)
• use of framework(s) illuminates textual interpretation
• shows an overview of the text
• engages closely with the meaning of the texts and analyses patterns
• conceptualised and often sophisticated analysis
• fluent, cohesive writing
Lower band 4 (23–25)
• coherent use of framework(s)
• some analytical probing of features and patterns
• thoughtful engagement with texts
• interpretation evident through approach taken
• fluent writing
Upper band 3 (20–22)
• uses framework(s) to highlight reading
• describes significant features/patterns
• shows awareness of stylistic and linguistic features
• engages with texts through explanation of features; possibly under-developed in places
• competent writing
Lower band 3 (16–19)
• uses a suitable framework(s) purposefully
• refers to a range of relevant points
• sense of patterns emerges in places; but comments under-developed
• distinguishes between different features fairly accurately but little comment on effect of features
• clear, straightforward expression
Upper band 2 (12–15)
• applies framework(s) to show awareness of some of writer’s choices
• largely accurate comments on texts but tending towards a feature-spotting approach, or a limited use of appropriate terminology
• broad comments on effects of features
• approach may be superficial
• expression communicates ideas but lacks flexibility
Lower band 2 (9–11)
• attempts to use framework(s) but with limited effectiveness
• identifies some points but understanding is not clear
• limited analysis occurs; much paraphrase
• some awareness of the focus of a text
• superficial sense of how language works
• writing communicates some ideas but lacks precision and accuracy
Upper band 1 (5–8)
• little coherence in selection of ideas
• little application of framework(s)
• lacks textual engagement offering instead implicit views of language use
• superficial ideas
• inaccurate expression and little sense of appropriate style
Lower band 1 (1–4)
• rudimentary awareness of narrative
• little awareness of frameworks
• minimal coherence/relevance of response
• markedly brief response
• frequent technical errors and weaknesses in expression
Zero marks (0)
• response failing to fulfil any of the lower band 1 requirements
MARK BAND DESCRIPTORS for (AO3)
Use integrated approaches to explore relationships between texts, analysing and evaluating the significance of contextual factors in their production and reception.
Upper band 4 (26–30)
• assimilates and contextualises references with originality
• overview that offers observations on wider contexts
• significant similarities and differences are analysed and in an original, personal, or conceptual, manner
• texts effortlessly integrated
• consistent and flexible focus on texts and theme
Lower band 4 (23–25)
• skilful and secure analysis and commentary
• clear sense of context/variation/contextual influences underpins reading
• sustained focus on texts and theme
• coherently compares and contrasts writer’s choices of form, structure, mode, language
• confident comparison
Upper band 3 (20–22)
• expresses clearly comparisons and contrasts between two texts
• clear interplay between text and context/sense of contextual variation
• comments clearly on a variety of points/areas
• analysis may be imbalanced; possible imbalance in text coverage but comparative framework clear
• clearly developed focus on texts and theme
Lower band 3 (16–19)
• points are made but not always clearly developed
• comparative analysis may be implicit
• some comments on language use in texts
• possible imbalance in coverage
• mainly consistent in focus on texts and theme
• context commented on
Upper band 2 (12–15)
• comparative framework(s) used but may be partial/simplistic
• develops a line of argument underpinned by comment on overall context
• probably list-like in construction
• imbalance in coverage of texts
• lacks evidence in places
• occasional loss of focus on texts and theme
Lower band 2 (9–11)
• makes use of comparative framework(s) but unable to apply them effectively
• general awareness of writer’s techniques and impact on meaning
• responds to obvious or broad links or comparisons
• may lack detail and evidence
• focus on texts and theme unsustained
Upper band 1 (5–8)
• insecure or superficial idea of context
• some points made but with limited understanding
• insecure focus on texts and themes
• lacks detail and probably little evidence used
Lower band 1 (1–4)
• rudimentary awareness of context
• ideas very limited or undeveloped
• contextual features identified but misread
• weak focus on texts and themes
Zero marks (0)
• response failing to fulfil any of the lower band 1 requirements
Key Terms Explained
Framework(s) – the analytical approaches available to analyse texts. For example literary, grammar, lexis, syntax, register and rhetoric.
Conceptualised – ability to appreciate and understand abstract concepts - themes
Stylistic – literary or specifically poetic writing style
Feature-spotting – identifying a technical feature in a text but without commenting on the effect of this feature on readers.
Implicit - assumed knowledge of a text by the student
Rudimentary - basic and straight forward
Assimilates - brings together ideas or different frameworks
Contextualises - the meaning of a quotation is understood within a poem. The meaning of a poem is understood in relation to other poems by the same poet. The poem is understood within the historical, political, biographical
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