Lunch and Learn - Larkin's Poems

Who is this course for?

Anyone who enjoys reading and discussing poems, or wants to give it a try.

What does this course cover:

Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985) was in many ways an unusual poetic figure. He was content to spend his entire working life as a librarian and write his poems on the side, despite becoming well-known and successful as a writer. He avoided literary life and ignored theories and trends; instead he remained in Hull, claiming that he wrote simply to “describe recognizable experiences as memorably as possible”. He was also politically conservative and his views on women and race were questionable at best. Yet his poems are often lyrical and moving, dealing with mortality, the meaning of existence and the restrained emotions of British provincial life. In his third collection, The Whitsun Weddings, Larkin reached maturity as a poet of great range and depth, offering social satire alongside philosophical questioning and formal precision. We will discuss and analyse several poems from this collection, including ‘Here’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Toads Revisited’ and ‘An Arundel Tomb’.

Topics for discussion may include:

· “A cut-price crowd” (‘Here’, line 15): how does Larkin portray ordinary people in his poems?

· What can we learn about British life in the twentieth century from Larkin’s poems? Is he a reliable guide to his times?

· “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth”: to what extent is Larkin the poet of misery?