How Philip Larkin, the poet, is different from the other contemporary poets of the 20th century (modern age)?Philip Larkin vs other contemporary...

Part II

It so happens that Larkin's personal emotions were on the dark and negative side. He disliked most people, particularly children and youths, and never married though he and Monica Jones, a professor of English, cohabitated most of his life. His recurring poetic themes included solitude, mortality and love, which were addressed from a bitter, dark point of view. Larkin didn't qualify physically to be a soldier in World War II, his eyesight was inadequate, so his darkness can't be attributed to having been at war the way fellow Modernist Robert Graves's gloom can be attributed to "shell shock" from World War I. However, anyone living through either, or both, of those wars, had a profound reason for gloom and darkness, which did , in fact, permeate post-world war era societies. W. H. Auden explores reasons for Larkin's dark negativity, for further information.

Larkin's poetry uses everyday language of simple and unpresuming words, rhythms and tones in its structure, in accord with the precepts of Modernism. It is notable that he was a great American jazz fan, which fit so well with the Modernist poetry movement since it emphasized rhythm so intently. Another one of his themes was, quite naturally, post-war England and England's prospects for the future along with England's ideas about the future. For Larkin, his negative poems are paradoxically a positive expression as he believes that every expression of poetry is positive. It can be surmised, then, that he also believed that the reader's experience of a negative sentiment and mentality in a negative poem would be equally positive. It is easy to suspect, when looking at the condition of the post-modernist 21st century, that Larkin was mistaken as to the positive virtue of negative sentiments, mentality and poetry.