| Philip Larkin's work is more balanced and universal than is generally recognized by critics who find his pessimism, idiomatic language, and post-war English settings too narrow for him to be ranked as a major poet. His contemporary images and themes of diminution and failure constitute a framework within which he explores large questions about existence in a world which has lost faith, continuity, and meaning. His first novel, Jill, looks forward to the most compelling themes of his mature poems and is the first extended sample we have of the poet's authentic voice. Drawing upon motifs in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this novel about isolation and alienation may well be considered a portrait of Larkin's emerging artistic sensibility. The poet's other novel, A Girl in Winter, concerns the same themes, but is more consciously shaped. In its structural ideas borrowed from Woolf's To the Lighthouse and its extended use of metaphor, myth, and poetic language, it is an example of the young artist experimenting with a variety of traditional forms for embodying his theme of loneliness. This second novel also reveals the poet's growing interest in the innate human desire for community, an important counter-theme which resonates in his mature poems.;Larkin's sense of personal and cosmic void is exhibited in the poems in concentrated images of constriction, enclosure, isolation, and disconnection. The concomitant spiritual disjunction his speakers feel is often expressed in sexist views of women and marriage. But when his speakers are able to think in terms of spiritual surprise and epiphany, these psychic barriers yield to affirmations of marriage, connection, continuity, and community. The result is often a kind of simultaneity of opposing visions, order and beauty amidst chaos and void. This double vision gives Larkin's poetry an exciting and profound complexity which has everything to do with the human spirit and very little to do with socio-cultural differences. For this reason, the poet's achievement has a humanity and universality which argues against the judgment that it is too insular and parochial to last. |
