W. H.

Auden
1907–1973
English poet, playwright, critic, and librettist Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a major influence on
the poetry of the 20th century. Auden grew up in Birmingham, England and was known for his
extraordinary intellect and wit. His first book, Poems, was published in 1930 with the help of T.S
Eliot. Just before World War II broke out, Auden emigrated to the United States where he met
the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong lover. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948
for The Age of Anxiety. Much of his poetry is concerned with moral issues and evidences a strong
political, social, and psychological context. While the teachings of Marx and Freud weighed
heavily in his early work, they later gave way to religious and spiritual influences. Some critics
have called Auden an anti-Romantic—a poet of analytical clarity who sought for order, for
universal patterns of human existence. Auden’s poetry is considered versatile and inventive,
ranging from the tersely epigrammatic to book-length verse, and incorporating a vast range of
scientific knowledge. Throughout his career, he collaborated with Christopher Isherwood
and Louis MacNeice, and also frequently joined with Chester Kallman to create libretti for
musical works by Benjamin Britten, Igor Stravinsky, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Today he
is considered one of the most skilled and creative mid-20th century poets who regularly wrote in
traditional rhyme and meter.
Auden was born and raised in a heavily industrial section of northern England. His father, a
prominent physician with an extensive knowledge of mythology and folklore, and his mother, a
strict Anglican, both exerted strong influences on Auden’s poetry. Auden’s early interest in
science and engineering earned him a scholarship to Oxford University, where his fascination
with poetry led him to change his field of study to English. His attraction to science never
completely waned, however, and scientific references are frequently found in his poetry. While
at Oxford, Auden became familiar with modernist poetry, particularly that of T.S. Eliot. It was
also at Oxford that Auden became the pivotal member of a group of writers called the “Oxford
Group” or the “Auden Generation,” which included Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis
MacNeice. The group adhered to various Marxist and anti-fascist doctrines and addressed social,
political, and economic concerns in their writings. Auden’s first book of poetry, Poems, was
privately printed by Stephen Spender in 1928. Critics have noted that Auden’s early verse
suggests the influences of Thomas Hardy, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Wilfred Owen, and Edward
Thomas. Stylistically, the poems are fragmentary and terse, relying on concrete images and
colloquial language to convey Auden’s political and psychological concerns.
Auden’s poems from the second half of the 1930s evidence his many travels during this period of
political turmoil. “Spain,” one of his most famous and widely anthologized pieces, is based on
his experiences in that country during its civil war of 1936 to 1939. Journey to War, a book of
the period written by Auden with Christopher Isherwood, features Auden’s sonnet sequence and
verse commentary, “In Time of War.” The first half of the sequence recounts the history of
humanity’s move away from rational thought, while the second half addresses the moral
problems faced by humankind on the verge of another world war. It was Auden who
characterized the 30s as “the age of anxiety.” His 1947 poem by that title, wrote Monroe K.
Spears in his Poetry of W.H. Auden, was a “sympathetic satire on the attempts of human beings
to escape, through their own efforts, the anxiety of our age.” Auden struck a chord in readers
with his timely treatment of the moral and political issues that directly affected them. Harold
Bloom suggested in the New Republic that “Auden [was] accepted as not only a great poet but

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also a Christian humanist sage not because of any conspiracy among moralizing neo-Christian
academicians, but because the age require[d] such a figure.”
Some critics have suggested that Auden’s unusual writing style germinated in the social climate
of his childhood. Robert Bloom, writing in PMLA, commented that in Auden’s writing in 1930,
“the omission of articles, demonstrative adjectives, subjects, conjunctions, relative pronouns,
auxiliary verbs—form a language of extremity and urgency. Like telegraphese ... it has time and
patience only for the most important words.” In his W.H. Auden as a Social Poet, Frederick
Buell identified the roots of this terse style in the private, codified language in which Auden and
his circle of schoolboy friends conversed. Buell quoted Christopher Isherwood, one of those
friends and later a collaborator with Auden, who described a typical conversation between two
members of the group: “We were each other’s ideal audience; nothing, not the slightest innuendo
or the subtlest shade of meaning, was lost between us. A joke which, if I had been speaking to a
stranger, would have taken five minutes to lead up to and elaborate and explain, could be
conveyed by the faintest hint. ... Our conversation would have been hardly intelligible to anyone
who had happened to overhear it; it was a rigamarole of private slang, deliberate misquotations,
bad puns, bits of parody, and preparatory school smut.” Peter E. Firchow felt that the nature of
Auden’s friendships affected not only his style but also his political views. In PMLA, Firchow
noted that Auden thought of his friends “as a ‘gang’ into which new members were periodically
recruited,” pointing out that Auden, “while never a Fascist, came at times remarkably close to
accepting some characteristically Fascist ideas, especially those having to do with a mistrust of
the intellect, the primacy of the group over the individual, the fascination with a strong leader
(who expresses the will of the group), and the worship of youth.”
 Auden left England in 1939 and became a citizen of the United States. His first book written in
America, Another Time, contains some of his best-known poems, among them “September 1,
1939” and “Musee des Beaux Arts,” which was inspired by a Breughel painting. The volume
also contains elegies to poets A.E. Housman, Matthew Arnold, and William Butler Yeats, whose
careers and aesthetic concerns had influenced the development of Auden’s artistic credo. A
famous line from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” is “Poetry makes nothing happen”—suggesting
Auden’s complete rejection of romantic ideals. Some critics have suggested that Auden’s
concentration on ethical concerns in Another Time was influenced by his reconversion to
Christianity, which he had previously abandoned at age 15. Others, such as John G. Blair (author
of The Poetic Art of W.H. Auden), however, have cautioned against reading Auden’s personal
sentiments into his poetry: “In none of his poems can one feel sure that the speaker is Auden
himself. In the course of his career he has demonstrated impressive facility in speaking through
any sort of dramatic persona; accordingly, the choice of an intimate, personal tone does not
imply the direct self-expression of the poet.”
Following several noted publications, The Double Man, For the Time Being, and The Sea and
the Mirror, Auden’s next volume of verse, The Collected Poetry, helped to solidify his
reputation as a major poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his following book, The Age of Anxiety:
A Baroque Eclogue, which features four characters of disparate backgrounds who meet in a New
York City bar during World War II. Written in the heavily alliterative style of Old English
literature, the poem explores the attempts of the protagonists to comprehend themselves and the
world in which they live. Auden’s next major work, Nones, includes another widely anthologized
piece, “In Praise of Limestone,” which asserts a powerful connection between the landscape
depicted and the psychology of Auden’s characters. Auden received a National Book Award in
Poetry for The Shield of Achilles in 1956.

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Auden possessed a formidable technique and an acute ear. In her book, Auden, Barbara Everett
commented on the poet’s facility: “In his verse, Auden can argue, reflect, joke, gossip, sing,
analyze, lecture, hector, and simply talk; he can sound, at will, like a psychologist on a political
platform, like a theologian at a party, or like a geologist in love; he can give dignity and authority
to nonsensical theories, and make newspaper headlines sound both true and melodious.” Jeremy
Robson noted in Encounter: “The influence of music on Auden’s verse ... has always been
salient: even his worst lines often ‘sound’ impressive.” Everett found that a musical sensibility
marked Auden’s work from the very beginning, and she felt that when “he turned more and
more, in the latter part of his career, to the kind of literary work that demands free exercise of
verbal and rhythmic talent—for instance, to the writing of libretti—[he developed] that side of
his artistic nature which was from the beginning the strongest.”

 Auden’s linguistic innovations, renowned enough to spawn the adjective “Audenesque,” were
described by Karl Shapiro in In Defense of Ignorance as “the modernization of diction, [and] the
enlarging of dictional language to permit a more contemporary-sounding speech.” As his career
progressed, however, Auden was more often chastised than praised for his idiosyncratic use of
language. James Fenton wrote in the New Statesman: “For years—for over forty years—the
technical experimentation started by Auden enlarged and enriched the scope of English verse. He
rediscovered and invented more than any other modern poet. ... And yet there grew up ... a
number of mannerisms, such as the use of nouns as verbs, or the employment of embarrassingly
outdated slang, or the ransacking of the OED [Oxford English Dictionary], which became in the
end a hindrance to his work.”

The extent to which Auden believed in various political theories is still debated; what is clear to
some critics, though, is that Auden habitually revised his writing to accommodate any shifts in
faith. Hannah Arendt considered Auden’s changes of heart to be a natural response to the flux of
the times. Arendt wrote in the New Yorker: “In the Forties, there were many who turned against
their old beliefs. ... They simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and
Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or
some refined Marxism.”
 
Buell drew a parallel between the political activism of Auden and that of playwright Bertolt
Brecht, noting that both men were “attempting to find an artistic voice for a left-wing polemic.”
Arendt supported Buell’s assertion, commenting that “[Auden] once mentioned as a ‘disease’ his
‘early addiction to German usages,’ but much more prominent than these, and less easy to get rid
of, was the obvious influence of Bertolt Brecht with whom he had more in common than he was
ever ready to admit. ... What made this influence possible was that [Auden and Brecht] both
belonged to the post-First World War generation, with its curious mixture of despair and joie de
vivre.” Buell found stylistic as well as political similarities. Bernard Bergonzi, writing
in Encounter, contended that ideologies were only tools to serve Auden’s foremost interest:
understanding the workings of the world. For Auden, said Bergonzi, Marxism and
psychoanalysis alike were “attractive as techniques of explanation.” Bergonzi posited that Auden
perceived reality as “actually or potentially known and intelligible, without mysteries or
uncertainty,” and that he considered experience to be a complex entity which could be “reduced
to classifiable elements, as a necessary preliminary to diagnosis and prescription.” Auden

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expressed his desire for order in his preface to Oxford Poetry 1927: “All genuine poetry is in a
sense the formation of private spheres out of a public chaos.” Bergonzi was one of many critics
who felt that Auden succeeded in giving his readers a feeling of the well-ordered “private
sphere.” He wrote: “At a time of world economic depression there was something reassuring in
Auden’s calm demonstration, mediated as much by style as by content, that reality was
intelligible, and could be studied like a map or a catalogue, or seen in temporal terms as an
inexorable historical process. ... It was the last time that any British poet was to have such a
global influence on poetry in English.”

 In his later years, Auden wrote three major volumes: City without Walls, and Many Other
Poems, Epistle to a Godson, and Other Poems, and the posthumously published Thank You,
Fog: Last Poems. While all three works are noted for their lexical range and humanitarian
content, Auden’s later poems often received mixed, and sometimes unenthusiastic, reviews.
Commenting on Thank You, Fog, Howard Moss in New York Times Book Review argued that the
collection is “half the ghost of what it might have been. Writers, being human, are not in a
position to choose their monuments. This one is more Audenesque than Auden, hardly fitting as
the final words, the summing up of a man who set his mark on an age.”

 Since Auden’s death in 1973, numerous anthologies of his works have been published, leading
to reevaluations (and in some respects, the critical rehabilitation) of the poet’s career. Edited by
Edward Mendelson, W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman: Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings by
W.H. Auden, 1939-1973, presents a compilation of Auden’s opera libretti, radio plays, film
narratives, liturgical dramas, and adaptations of Euripides and Shakespeare, many of which were
written in collaboration with Chester Kallman. While the collection points to Auden’s diverse
musical and dramatic interests, “the libretti are rightly the focus of the book,” observed J. D.
McClatchy in New Republic. McClatchy continued: “[The opera libretto] The Rake’s
Progress remains [Auden and Kallman’s] masterpiece. Simplest verse is the hardest to write,
because it is most exposed, and Auden’s spare style here achieves both elegance and
speechliness.” Highlighting Auden’s writing partnership with Christopher Isherwood during the
early years of their collaboration is Mendelson’s W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood: Plays
and Other Dramatic Writings by W.H. Auden 1928-1938, which contains plays, scripts for
documentary films and a radio play, and a cabaret act. The plays in the volume, such as The
Dance of Death and The Dog Beneath the Skin, reveal Auden’s early desire to eschew dramatic
realism in favor of the more ritualistic and communal dramatic forms that characterized the
Mystery plays of the Middle Ages. The subject matter of the plays nevertheless demonstrates
their modern orientation, as political and psychological commentary are of central importance.

 Edited by Katherine Bucknell and Nicholas Jenkins (cofounders of the W.H. Auden
society), “The Map of All My Youth:” Early Works, Friends and Influences contains several
previously unpublished works by Auden, including six poems from the 1930s and an essay by
Auden titled “Writing.” The first in a planned series of scholarly books dedicated “not only to
Auden but also [to] his friends and contemporaries, those who influenced him, and those by
whom he was influenced,” the volume also contains correspondence between Auden and
Stephen Spender and critical essays on Auden by contemporary scholars.

 Auden’s milieu is further explored in A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W.H.

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Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Reader’s Subscription and Mid-Century
Book Clubs. The book club in question, the Reader’s Subscription Club, later became the Mid-
Century Book Club. It was formed in 1951 in an effort to cultivate a readership for literary
novels that would not necessarily appeal to mainstream audiences. Auden, Barzun, and Trilling
were the club’s editorial board, and the book collects some of their reviews and articles which
originally appeared in the club’s periodicals—the Griffin and the Mid-Century. 15 of Auden’s
essays are included.
 
Auden’s relevance to literature continues with the publication of Lectures on Shakespeare, a
collection dating from 1946, when Auden taught a course on Shakespeare at the New School for
Social Research in New York City. The lectures were reconstructed from the scrupulous notes
taken by Auden’s students, which were then edited by Arthur Kirsch. Auden discusses
Shakespeare’s plays with an eye toward their historical and cultural relevance, comparing
Richard III to Hitler, for example. William Logan in the New York Times Book Review noted that
“Auden wrote criticism as if he had better things to do, which made its brilliance the more
irritating.” He characterized Auden’s Shakespeare lectures as “rambling and sociable ... at times
whimsical and perverse,” and explained that Auden’s criticism is informed both by
psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Sören Kierkegaard. Auden’s more audacious observations
about Hamlet, for example, include his belief that the title role should be played by someone
dragged off the street rather than an actor, and that the plot can be compared to New York’s
infamous Tammany Hall political machine. Cautioning that the essays are not Auden’s exact
words and should not be accepted as such, Logan nevertheless concluded that “these flawed and
personal lectures tell us more about Auden than his sometimes-perfect verses.”

 Auden’s career has undergone much reevaluation in recent decades. While some critics have
contended that he wrote his finest work when his political sentiments were less obscured by
religion and philosophy, others defend his later material as the work of a highly original and
mature intellect. Many critics echo the assessment of Auden’s career by the National Book
Committee, which awarded him the National Medal for Literature in 1967: “[Auden’s poetry]
has illuminated our lives and times with grace, wit and vitality. His work, branded by the moral
and ideological fires of our age, breathes with eloquence, perception and intellectual power.”

Philip Larkin
1922–1985

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry, England in 1922. He earned his BA from St. John’s College,
Oxford, where he befriended novelist and poet Kingsley Amis and finished with First Class
Honors in English. After graduating, Larkin undertook professional studies to become a
librarian. He worked in libraries his entire life, first in Shropshire and Leicester, and then at
Queen’s College in Belfast, and finally as librarian at the University of Hull. In addition to
collections of poetry, Larkin published two novels—Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947)—as
well as criticism, essays, and reviews of jazz music. The latter were collected in two
volumes: All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1968 (1970; 1985) and Required Writing:
Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982  (1984). He was one of post-war England’s most famous poets,
and was commonly referred to as “England’s other Poet Laureate” until his death in 1985.

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Indeed, when the position of laureate became vacant in 1984, many poets and critics favored
Larkin’s appointment, but Larkin preferred to avoid the limelight.
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 (1955), The Whitsun
Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974), 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 noted 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. Phoenix contributor Alun R.
Jones suggests that, as librarian 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.” From his base in Hull, Larkin composed poetry that both reflected the dreariness of
postwar provincial England and voiced the spiritual despair of the modern age. 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
noted 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 30-year association
with the library at the University of Hull. He is still admired for his expansion and modernization
of that facility.

Larkin’s Selected Letters, edited by his longtime friend, poet Anthony Thwaite, reveals much
about the writer’s personal and professional life between 1940 and 1985. Washington Post Book

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World reviewer John Simon noted 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. Hardy’s work provided the main impetus to Larkin’s mature poetry, according to
critics. A biographer in Contemporary Literary Criticism claimed “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.” In Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction
(Methuen, 1979), Peter R. 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.” 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.”
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 added 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 observed 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 received almost
universal approval from literary critics. London Sunday Times correspondent Ian Hamilton
wrote: “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 expressed 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

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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 was traditional, the subject matter of his poetry was derived exclusively from
modern life. In the Southern Review, John Press contended 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 noted, 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 observed: “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 maintained 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.
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 can find moments of affirmation in Larkin’s poetry, notwithstanding its pessimistic and
cynical bent. 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
expanded 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

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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 once quoted 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 sensed this
quiet catharsis when he concluded: “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.”
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 created a barrier between
an artist and the audience and provided 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 noted, 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
commented 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 found 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 noted, 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,” asserted Seamus Heaney in
the Observer. The collection contains Larkin’s six previous volumes of poetry as well as 83 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 pointed 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 25th 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 called Jill “one of the better

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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 noted 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 30-
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 claimed 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 drew 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

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crass, stubborn, and yet unavoidably lovable curmudgeon who tends to poke his head out at the
most inopportune times.”
Ted Hughes
1930–1998
One of the giants of 20th century British poetry, Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd,
Yorkshire in 1930. After serving as in the Royal Air Force, Hughes attended Cambridge, where
he studied archeology and anthropology, taking a special interest in myths and legends. In 1956
he met and married the American poet Sylvia Plath, who encouraged him to submit his
manuscript to a first book contest run by The Poetry Center. Awarded first prize by
judges Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, The Hawk in the Rain  (1957)
secured Hughes’s reputation as a poet of international stature. According to poet and
critic Robert B. Shaw, “Hughes’s poetry signaled a dramatic departure from the prevailing
modes of the period. The stereotypical poem of the time was determined not to risk too much:
politely domestic in its subject matter, understated and mildly ironic in style. By contrast,
Hughes marshaled a language of nearly Shakespearean resonance to explore themes which were
mythic and elemental.” Hughes’s long career included unprecedented best-selling volumes such
as Lupercal (1960), Crow (1970), Selected Poems 1957-1981 (1982), and The Birthday
Letters (1998), as well as many beloved children’s books, including The Iron Man (1968).
With Seamus Heaney, he edited the popular anthologies The Rattle Bag (1982) and The School
Bag (1997). Named executor of Plath’s literary estate, he edited several volumes of her work.
Hughes also translated works from Classical authors, including Ovid and Aeschylus. An
incredibly prolific poet, translator, editor, and children’s book author, Hughes was appointed
Poet Laureate in 1984, a post he held until his death. Among his many awards, he was appointed
to the Order of Merit, one of Britain’s highest honors.
The rural landscape of Hughes’s youth in Yorkshire exerted a lasting influence on his work. To
read Hughes’s poetry is to enter a world dominated by nature, especially by animals. This holds
true for nearly all of his books, from The Hawk in the Rain to Wolfwatching  (1989)
and Moortown Diary (1989), two of his late collections. Hughes’s love of animals was one of the
catalysts in his decision to become a poet. According to London Times contributor Thomas Nye,
Hughes once confessed “that he began writing poems in adolescence, when it dawned upon him
that his earlier passion for hunting animals in his native Yorkshire ended either in the possession
of a dead animal, or at best a trapped one. He wanted to capture not just live animals, but the
aliveness of animals in their natural state: their wildness, their quiddity, the fox-ness of the fox
and the crow-ness of the crow.” However, Hughes’s interest in animals was generally less
naturalistic than symbolic. Using figures such as “Crow” to approximate a mythic everyman,
Hughes’s work speaks to his concern with poetry’s vatic, even shamanic powers. Working in
sequences and lists, Hughes frequently uncovered a kind of autochthonous, yet literary, English
language. According to Peter Davison in the New York Times, “While inhabiting the bodies of
creatures, mostly male, Hughes clambers back down the evolutionary chain. He searches deep
into the riddles of language, too, those that precede any given tongue, language that reeks of the
forest or even the jungle. Such poems often contain a touch—or more than a touch—of
melodrama, of the brutal tragedies of Seneca that Hughes adapted for the modern stage.”
Hughes’s posthumous publications include Selected Poems 1957-1994 (2002), an updated and
expanded version of the original 1982 edition, and Letters of Ted Hughes (2008), which were
edited by Christopher Reid and showcase Hughes’s voluminous correspondence. According
to David Orr in the New York Times, Hughes’s “letters are immediately interesting and

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accessible to third parties to whom they aren’t addressed… Hughes can turn out a memorable
description (biographies of Plath are ‘a perpetual smoldering in the cellar for us. There’s always
one or two smoking away’), and his offhand observations about poetry can be startlingly
perceptive.” The publication of Hughes’s Collected Poems (2003) provided new insights into
Hughes’s writing process. Sean O’Brien in the Guardian noted, “Hughes conducted more than
one life as a poet.” Publishing both single volumes with Faber, Hughes also released a huge
amount of work through small presses and magazines. These poems were frequently not
collected, and it seems Hughes thought of his small-press efforts as experiments to see if the
poems deserved placement in collections. O’Brien continued: “Clearly [Hughes] needed to be
writing all the time, and many of the hitherto uncollected poems have the provisional air of
resting for a moment before being taken to completion—except that half the time completion
didn't occur and wasn't even the issue… as far as the complete body of work went, Hughes
seems to have been more interested in process than outcome.”  
Though Hughes is now unequivocally recognized as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century,
his reputation as a poet during his lifetime was perhaps unfairly framed by two events: the
suicide of Plath in 1963, and, in 1969, the suicide of the woman he left Plath for, Assia Wevill,
who also took the life of their young daughter, Shura. As Plath’s executor, Hughes’s decision to
destroy her final diary and his refusal of publication rights to her poems irked many in the
literary community. Plath was taken up by some as a symbol of suppressed female genius in the
decade after her suicide, and in this scenario Hughes was often cast as the villain. His readings
were disrupted by cries of “murderer!” and his surname, which appears on Plath’s gravestone,
was repeatedly defaced. Hughes’s unpopular decisions regarding Plath’s writings, over which he
had total control after her death, were often in service of his definition of privacy; he also refused
to discuss his marriage to Plath after her death. Thus it was with great surprise that, in 1998, the
literary world received Hughes’s quite intimate portrait of Plath in the form of Birthday Letters, a
collection of prose poems covering every aspect of his relationship with his first wife. The
collection received both critical praise and censure; Hughes’s desire to break the silence around
Plath’s death was welcomed, even as the poems themselves were scrutinized. Yet despite
reservations, Katha Pollitt wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Hughes’s tone,
“emotional, direct, regretful, entranced—pervades the book’s strongest poems, which are quiet
and thoughtful and conversational. Plath is always ‘you’—as though an old man were leafing
through an album with a ghost.”
Though marked by a period of pain and controversy in the 1960s, Hughes’s later life was spent
writing and farming. He married Carol Orchard in 1970, and the couple lived on a small farm in
Devon until his death. His forays into translations, essays, and criticism were noted for their
intelligence and range. Hughes continued writing and publishing poems until his death, from
cancer, on October 28, 1998. A memorial to Hughes in the famed Poets’ Corner of Westminster
Abbey was unveiled in 2011.

Carol Ann Duffy

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Carol Ann Duffy is an award-winning Scottish poet who, according to Danette DiMarco
in Mosaic, is the poet of “post-post war England: Thatcher’s England.” Duffy is best known for
writing love poems that often take the form of monologues. Her verses, as
an Economist reviewer described them, are typically “spoken in the voices of the urban
disaffected, people on the margins of society who harbour resentments and grudges against the
world.” Although she knew she was a lesbian since her days at St. Joseph’s convent school, her
early love poems give no indication of her homosexuality; the object of love in her verses is
someone whose gender is not specified. With her 1993 collection, Mean Time, and
1994’s Selected Poems, she would begin to also write about queer love.

Duffy’s poetry has always been strong and feminist. This position is especially well captured in
her first collection, Standing Female Nude, in which the title poem consists of an interior
monologue comprising a female model’s response to the male artist who is painting her image in
a Cubist style. Although at first the conversation seems to indicate the model’s acceptance of
conventional attitudes about beauty in art—and, by extension, what an ideal woman should be—
as the poem progresses Duffy deconstructs these traditional beliefs. Ultimately, the poet
expresses that “the model cannot be contained by the visual art that would regulate her,”
explained DiMarco. “And here the way the poem ends with the model’s final comment on the
painting ‘It does not look like me’—is especially instructive. On the one hand, her response
suggests that she is naive and does not understand the nature of Cubist art. On the other hand,
however, the comment suggests her own variableness, and challenges traditionalist notions that
the naked model can, indeed, be transmogrified into the male artist’s representation of her in the
nude form. To the model, the painting does not represent either what she understands herself to
be or her lifestyle.”

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Duffy is also the United Kingdom’s poet laureate,
the first woman to be appointed the position in 400 years. She was seriously considered for the
position in 1999. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s administration had wanted a poet laureate who
exemplified the new “Cool Britannia,” not an establishment figure, and Duffy was certainly
anything but establishment. She is the Scottish-born lesbian daughter of two Glasgow working-
class radicals. Her female partner is also a poet and the two of them are raising a child together.
Duffy has a strong following among young Britons, partially because her poetry collection Mean
Time was included in Britain’s A-level curriculum, but Blair was worried about how “middle
England” would react to a lesbian poet laureate. There were also concerns in the administration
about what Britain’s notorious tabloids would write about her sexuality, and about comments
that Duffy had made urging an updated role for the poet laureate. In the end, Blair opted for the
safe choice and named Andrew Motion to the post.

After Duffy had been passed over, Katherine Viner wrote in the Guardian Weekend that her
“poems are accessible and entertaining, yet her form is classical, her technique razor-sharp. She
is read by people who don’t really read poetry, yet she maintains the respect of her peers.
Reviewers praise her touching, sensitive, witty evocations of love, loss, dislocation, nostalgia;
fans talk of greeting her at readings ‘with claps and cheers that would not sound out of place at a
rock concert.’” Viner lamented that Duffy only came to the attention of many people when she
was caricatured and rejected as poet laureate. However, the poet got some satisfaction when she
earned the National Lottery award of 75,000 pounds, a sum that far exceeded the stipend that

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poet laureates receive.

After the laureate debacle, Duffy was further vindicated when her next original collection of
poems, The World’s Wife, received high acclaim from critics. In what Antioch
Review contributor Jane Satterfield called “masterful subversions of myth and history,” the
poems in this collection are all told from the points of view of the women behind famous male
figures, both real and fictional, including the wives and lovers of Aesop, Pontius Pilate, Faust,
Tiresias, Herod, Quasimodo, Lazarus, Sisyphus, Freud, Darwin, and even King Kong. Not all the
women are wives, however. For example, one poem is told from Medusa’s point of view as she
expresses her feelings before being slain by Perseus; “Little Red-Cap” takes the story of Little
Red Riding Hood to a new level as a teenage girl is seduced by a “wolf-poet.” These fresh
perspectives allow Duffy to indulge in a great deal of humor and wit as, for example, Mrs. Aesop
grows tired of her husband’s constant moralizing, Mrs. Freud complains about the great
psychologist’s obsession with penises, Sisyphus’s bride is stuck with a workaholic, and Mrs.
Lazarus, after finding a new husband, has her life ruined by the return of her formerly dead
husband. There are conflicting emotions as well in such poems as “Mrs. Midas,” in which the
narrator is disgusted by her husband’s greed, but, at the same time, longs for something she can
never have: his physical touch. “The World’s Wife appeals and astonishes,” said Satterfield.
“Duffy’s mastery of personae allows for seamless movement through the centuries; in this
complementary chorus, there’s voice and vision for the coming ones.” An Economist reviewer
felt that the collection “is savage, trenchant, humorous and wonderfully inventive at its best.”
And Ray Olson, in Booklist, concluded that “Duffy’s takes on the stuff of legends are … richly
rewarding.”
Duffy’s recent collections include her Collected Poems (2015), The Bees (2011), winner of the
Costa Poetry Award and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Rapture (2005), winner of the
T.S. Eliot Prize. Duffy has also written verses for children. Her several collections of children’s
poetry include The Gift (2010), New and Collected Poems for Children (2009), and The
Hat  (2007).
In addition to her original poetry, Duffy has edited numerous anthologies, including To the
Moon: An Anthology of Lunar Poems (2009) and Answering Back (2009), and has adapted eight
classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales in Grimm Tales. Not intended for young children but for older
children and young adults in drama and English classes, Grimm Tales includes adaptations of
such stories as “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Golden Goose,” which are rewritten “with a poet’s
vigor and economy, combining traditions of style with direct, colloquial dialogue,” according to
Vida Conway in School Librarian.
Duffy is a professor of contemporary poetry and the creative director of the Writing School at
Manchester Metropolitan University. She lives in Manchester.

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