Editing Philip Larkin (section)

===Critical opinion===
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In 1980, Neil Powell wrote: "It is probably fair to say that Philip Larkin is less highly regarded in academic circles than either [[Thom Gunn]] or [[Donald Davie]]".<ref>Powell 1980, p. 83.</ref> But since the turn of the century, Larkin's standing has increased. "Philip Larkin is an excellent example of the plain style in modern times", writes Tijana Stojkovic.<ref>Stojkovic 2006, p. 37.</ref> Robert Sheppard asserts: "It is by general consent that the work of Philip Larkin is taken to be exemplary".<ref>Sheppard 2005, p. 23.</ref> "Larkin is the most widely celebrated and arguably the finest poet of the Movement", states Keith Tuma, and his poetry is "more various than its reputation for dour pessimism and anecdotes of a disappointed middle class suggests".<ref name="Tuma 2001, p. 445"/>

Stephen Cooper's ''Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer'' and John Osborne's "Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence" suggest the changing temper of Larkin studies, the latter attacking eminent critics such as James Booth and Anthony Thwaite for their readiness to reduce the poems to works of biography, and stressing instead the genius of Larkin's universality and deconstructionism. Cooper argues that "The interplay of signs and motifs in the early work orchestrates a subversion of conventional attitudes towards class, gender, authority and sexual relations".<ref>Cooper 2004, p. 1.</ref> Cooper identifies Larkin as a progressive writer, and perceives in the letters a "plea for alternative constructs of masculinity, femininity and social and political organisation".<ref>Cooper 2004, p. 2.</ref> Cooper draws on the entire canon of Larkin's works, as well as on unpublished correspondence, to counter the image of Larkin as merely a racist, misogynist reactionary. Instead he identifies in Larkin what he calls a "subversive imagination".<ref>Cooper 2004, p. 3.</ref> He highlights in particular "Larkin's objections to the hypocrisies of conventional sexual politics that hamper the lives of both sexes in equal measure".<ref>Cooper 2004, p. 179.</ref>

In similar vein to Cooper, Stephen Regan notes in an essay entitled "Philip Larkin: a late modern poet" that Larkin frequently embraces devices associated with the experimental practices of [[Modernism]], such as "linguistic strangeness, self-conscious literariness, radical self-questioning, sudden shifts of voice and register, complex viewpoints and perspectives, and symbolist intensity".<ref>Corcoran 2007, p. 149.</ref>

A further indication of a new direction in the critical valuation of Larkin is [[Sisir Kumar Chatterjee]]'s statement that "Larkin is no longer just a name but an institution, a modern British national cultural monument".<ref>Chatterjee 2007, p. 4.</ref>

Chatterjee's view of Larkin is grounded in a detailed analysis of his poetic style. He observes a development from Larkin's early works to his later ones, which sees his style change from "verbal opulence through a recognition of the self-ironising and self-negating potentiality of language to a linguistic domain where the conventionally held conceptual incompatibles – which are traditional binary oppositions between absolutes and relatives, between abstracts and concretes, between fallings and risings and between singleness and multiplicity – are found to be the last stumbling-block for an artist aspiring to rise above the impasse of worldliness".<ref>Chatterjee 2007, p. 331.</ref> This contrasts with an older view that Larkin's style barely changed over the course of his poetic career. Chatterjee identifies this view as being typified by [[Bernard Bergonzi]]'s comment that "Larkin's poetry did not ... develop between 1955 and 1974".<ref>Chatterjee 2007, p. 14.</ref> For Chatterjee, Larkin's poetry responds strongly to changing "economic, socio-political, literary and cultural factors".<ref>Chatterjee 2007, p. 18.</ref>

[[File:King Edward Street Kingston upon Hull in 1963 (2) - geograph.org.uk - 678599.jpg|right|thumb|S. K. Chatterjee talks of Larkin's responsiveness to economic, socio-political and cultural factors. In "Here" Larkin writes of "residents from raw estates, brought down / The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced [[Trolleybuses in Kingston upon Hull|trolleys]]".|alt=Trolley buses on Hull's King Edward Street in 1963, two years after Larkin finished "Here"]]
Chatterjee argues: "It is under the defeatist veneer of his poetry that the positive side of Larkin's vision of life is hidden".<ref>Chatterjee 2007, p. 356.</ref> This positivity, suggests Chatterjee, is most apparent in his later works. Over the course of Larkin's poetic career: "The most notable attitudinal development lay in the zone of his view of life, which from being almost irredeemably bleak and pessimistic in ''The North Ship'', became more and more positive with the passage of time".<ref>Chatterjee 2007, p. 19.</ref>

The view that Larkin is not a [[nihilism|nihilist]] or [[pessimist]], but actually displays optimism in his works, is certainly not universally endorsed, but Chatterjee's study suggests the degree to which old stereotypes of Larkin are now being transcended. Representative of these stereotypes is [[Bryan Appleyard]]'s judgement (quoted by Maeve Brennan) that of the writers who "have adopted a personal pose of extreme pessimism and loathing of the world ... none has done so with quite such a grinding focus on littleness and triviality as Larkin the man".<ref name="brennan109">Brennan 2002, p. 109.</ref> Recent criticism of Larkin demonstrates a more complex set of values at work in his poetry and across the totality of his writings.<ref>Ingelbien 2002, p. 13.</ref>

The debate about Larkin is summed up by Matthew Johnson, who observes that in most evaluations of Larkin "one is not really discussing the man, but actually reading a coded and implicit discussion of the supposed values of 'Englishness' that he is held to represent".<ref>Johnson 2007, p. 66.</ref> Changing attitudes to Englishness are reflected in changing attitudes to Larkin, and the more sustained intellectual interest in the English national character, as embodied in the works of [[Peter Mandler]] for instance, pinpoint one key reason why there is an increased scholarly interest in Larkin.<ref>Ingelbien 2002, p. 196.</ref>

A summative view similar to those of Johnson and Regan is that of Robert Crawford, who argues that "In various ways, Larkin's work depends on, and develops from, Modernism." Furthermore, he "demonstrates just how slippery the word 'English' is".<ref>Crawford 2000, p. 276.</ref>

Despite these recent developments, Larkin and his circle are nonetheless still firmly rejected by modernist critics and poets. For example, the poet [[Andrew Duncan (poet)|Andrew Duncan]], writing of [[The Movement (literature)|The Movement]] on his pinko.org website,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/poets/duncan.htm |title=Biography of Andrew Duncan |publisher=Soton.ac.uk |date=12 February 2004 |access-date=15 September 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091001022115/http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/poets/duncan.htm |archive-date=1 October 2009 }}</ref> is of the opinion that "there now seems to be a very wide consensus that it was a bad thing, and that Movement poems are tedious, shallow, smug, sententious, emotionally dead, etc. Their successors in the mainstream retain most of these characteristics. Wolfgang Gortschacher's book on Little Magazine Profiles ... shows ... that there was a terrific dearth of magazines during the 50s—an impoverishment of openings which correlates with rigid and conservative poetry, and with the hegemony of a few people determined to exclude dissidents."<ref>Notes on the poetry of the 1940s: [http://www.pinko.org/108.html Pinko.org] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080706092047/http://www.pinko.org/108.html |date=6 July 2008 }}</ref> 

[[Peter Riley]], a participant in the [[British Poetry Revival]], which was a reaction against The Movement's poets, has also criticised Larkin for his uncritical and ideologically narrow position: "What after all were Larkin and The Movement but a denial of the effusive ethics of poetry from 1795 onwards, in favour of 'This is what life is really like' as if anyone thought for a second of representing observable 'life'. [[W.S. Graham]] and [[Dylan Thomas]] knew perfectly well that 'life' was like that, if you nominated it thus, which is why they went elsewhere."<ref>{{cite web
 |url=http://jacketmagazine.com/26/rile-grah.html
 |title=Jacket 26 – Peter Riley reviews W.S. Graham, "New Collected Poems"
 |editor=Matthew Francis
 |publisher=Jacketmagazine.com
 |access-date=1 May 2009
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090515172020/http://jacketmagazine.com/26/rile-grah.html
 |archive-date=15 May 2009
|url-status=live
 }}</ref>