Philip Larkin was a poet who employed traditional tools of poetry such as rhyme, stanza, and meter to explore the often uncomfortable or terrifying experiences thrust upon common people in the modern age. He was known for his technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, yet profoundly disturbing and approachable body of verse. Larkins work was influenced by Thomas Hardys verse, inspiring him to write with greater austerity and to link experiences and emotions with detailed settings. He focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity, and his poetry often reflected a clipped, antiromantic sensibility prevalent in English verse in the 1950s. Larkins style was characterized by its plainness and scepticism, and his voice on the page was particularly suited to reading aloud, giving the impression of "a chap chatting to chaps".
Larkins poetry, though lucid, remains complex and conflicted, and his attitudes to race, for example, maintained a precarious suspension between an inherited xenophobia and a love of jazz. His works worth may be founded upon its conflicted nature, and a re-revisionist approach might resurrect Larkins reputation and illuminate contemporary cultural tensions.
