Editing Philip Larkin (section)

===Poetic style===
{{Quote box |quoted=true
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 |quote=I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.<br />Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.<br />In time the curtain-edges will grow light.<br />Till then I see what's really always there:<br />Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,<br />Making all thought impossible but how<br />And where and when I shall myself die.
 |source=''from'' "Aubade" (1977), ''[[Collected Poems – 2003 edition (Philip Larkin)|Collected Poems]]''
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Larkin's poetry has been characterized as combining "an ordinary, colloquial style", "clarity", a "quiet, reflective tone", "ironic understatement" and a "direct" engagement with "commonplace experiences",<ref>Moran 2002, p. 151.</ref> while [[Jean Hartley]] summed his style up as a "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent".<ref name="poetryarchive1">{{cite web
 |url=http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7076
 |title=Philip Larkin (1922–1985)
 |publisher=Poetryarchive.org
 |year=2008
 |access-date=6 May 2009
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090507171728/http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7076
 |archive-date=7 May 2009
|url-status=dead
 }}</ref>

Larkin's earliest work showed the influence of Eliot, Auden and Yeats, and the development of his mature poetic identity in the early 1950s coincided with the growing influence on him of [[Thomas Hardy]].<ref name="bradford70"/> The "mature" Larkin style, first evident in ''The Less Deceived'', is "that of the detached, sometimes lugubrious, sometimes tender observer", who, in Hartley's phrase, looks at "ordinary people doing ordinary things". He disparaged poems that relied on "shared classical and literary allusions – what he called ''the myth-kitty'', and the poems are never cluttered with elaborate imagery."<ref>[[Jean Sprackland]], speaking on ''The Whitsun Weddings'' BBC Radio Four, 1 December 2013 [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03jyp1k] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131210021049/http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03jyp1k|date=10 December 2013}}</ref> Larkin's mature poetic persona is notable for its "plainness and scepticism". Other recurrent features of his mature work are sudden openings and "highly-structured but flexible verse forms".<ref name="poetryarchive1"/>

[[File:Thomashardy restored.jpg|upright|right|thumb|The poetry of [[Thomas Hardy]] was the influence that helped Larkin reach his mature style.|alt=A black and white photograph of Hardy from his late middle age. He is wearing smart, formal clothes, such as a stiff collar and tie. He has a well-tended handlebar moustache]]
Terence Hawkes has argued that while most of the poems in ''The North Ship'' are "metaphoric in nature, heavily indebted to Yeats's symbolist lyrics", the subsequent development of Larkin's mature style is "not ... a movement from Yeats to Hardy, but rather a surrounding of the Yeatsian moment (the metaphor) within a Hardyesque frame". In Hawkes's view, "Larkin's poetry ... revolves around two losses": the "loss of modernism", which manifests itself as "the desire to find a moment of epiphany", and "the loss of England, or rather the loss of the British Empire, which requires England to define itself in its own terms when previously it could define 'Englishness' in opposition to something else."<ref>Hawkes 1995, p. 285.</ref>

In 1972, Larkin wrote the oft-quoted "Going, Going", a poem which expresses a romantic [[fatalism]] in its view of England that was typical of his later years. In it he prophesies a complete destruction of the countryside, and expresses an idealised sense of national togetherness and identity: "And that will be England gone&nbsp;... it will linger on in galleries; but all that remains for us will be concrete and tyres". The poem ends with the blunt statement, "I just think it will happen, soon."<ref>{{cite book
 |first=Philip
 |last=Larkin
 |title=Collected Poems
 |year=1988
 |page=190}}
</ref>

Larkin's style is bound up with his recurring themes and subjects, which include death and fatalism, as in his final major poem "Aubade".<ref>Motion 1993, pp. 468–9.</ref> Poet [[Andrew Motion]] observes of Larkin's poems: "their rage or contempt is always checked by the ... energy of their language and the satisfactions of their articulate formal control". Motion contrasts two aspects of his poetic personality—on the one hand, an enthusiasm for "symbolist moments" and "freely imaginative narratives", and on the other a "remorseless factuality" and "crudity of language". Motion defines this as a "life-enhancing struggle between opposites", and concludes that his poetry is typically "ambivalent": "His three mature collections have developed attitudes and styles of ... imaginative daring: in their prolonged debates with despair, they testify to wide sympathies, contain passages of frequently transcendent beauty, and demonstrate a poetic inclusiveness which is of immense consequence for his literary heirs."<ref>{{cite book
 |first=Andrew
 |last=Motion
 |title= Philip Larkin and Symbolism
 |editor-first=Stephen
 |editor-last=Regan
 |year=1997
 |pages= 32, 49–50, 52–53
 |publisher=[[Palgrave Macmillan]]
 |isbn=978-0-333-60483-0}}
</ref>