Larkin: critic quotes on pessimism
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Christopher Ricks
‘[He writes] like something almost being said…it is a study in self-pity.’
Bryan Appleyard (misanthropy)
‘He is an advocate of misanthropy and pessimism.’
Bryan Appleyard (pessimist)
‘[Larkin is] a hopeless and inflexible pessimist.’
Bryan Appleyard (triviality)
‘Many poets ‘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’
Philip Larkin
‘It’s unhappiness that provokes a poem.
Being happy doesn’t provoke a poem.’
Leo Cox (non-existence)
‘For him, life is just a brief and over-rated interlude in the ongoing state of non-existence.’
Leo Cox (nature)
‘Larkin uses nature as a medium for discussing his preoccupation with how transient and pointless everything in the world is.’
Leo Cox (existence)
‘Larkin feels cheated by existence.’
Janice Rossen
‘So much of Larkin’s habitual melancholy is driven by intense fury.’
Andrew Motion
‘Larkin’s poetry grows out of rage: the rage of unsatisfied desire, the rage of “shame”.
’
Leo Cox (degraded)
‘Birth, death, funerals, love, community and marriage are all degraded at Larkin’s hands.’
Bryan Appleyard (misery)
‘His dreary, predictable, damp, reductive misery tolls relentlessly.’
Bryan Appleyard (inward)
‘Larkin was seldom more than grimly inward and futile.’
Andy Golding
‘Cynicism is never far away from Larkin’s poetry.’
Larkin: critic quotes on pessimism. (2018, Jan 12). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/paper-on-larkin-critic-quotes-on-pessimism/
