Philip Larkin as a love poet

Abstract

This thesis examines to what extent it is justifiable to classify Philip Larkin as a love poet. It finds that love is indeed one of the central themes in the work of this poet, who is usually associated with other, much bleaker, themes such as death. Through detailed close reading of his poems and reference to his prose, it explores the nature, the possibility and different aspects of human relationships and love, whose significance in Larkin's work is never taken at face value and whose treatment is unconventional. In order to understand love's place in his poetry, more general themes are discussed, such as the place of illusions and ideals in people's lives, possibility of choice, the question of desire, and personal identity in relationships. In order to discuss these themes in depth, the thesis also investigates the ways in which Larkin's poems about love fit into the tradition of English poetry. It further presents an extensive outline of Larkin's development as a love poet showing how the themes connected with love and their formal treatment changed throughout his writing career.

This thesis has tried to show that most of Philip Larkin's poems have something to say about love. However, whether it allows us to call Larkin a love poet or not is difficult to say. Perhaps Larkin did not write enough about love to be called a love poet; or perhaps he wrote too much. He did not write enough in the sense that there are no long (or short) lists of poems about a beloved person or about being in love. And he wrote too much in the sense that love is so important in the poetry that it cannot be isolated only in a few love poems. Larkin did not treat love as a special category of occurrences which could be separated from everything else that belongs to people's lives (and deaths). Therefore one could not speak of Larkin as of a love poet as well as one could not speak of Larkin as a nature poet or as a poet of deprivation. Larkin diligently escapes all such simplifying categories by his rich and complex body of work. The only thing one could say without any further specification is that Larkin is a poet, and the greater poet for escaping all the limiting categories. We certainly can be glad that "poetry chose [him]" (RW 62).