"English poets are being forced to explore not just the matter of England, but what is the matter with England" (Seamus Heaney) - Discuss.

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Laura Hawkins

Post-War Poetry Essay 1

“English poets are being forced to explore not just the matter of England, but what is the matter with England”  (Seamus Heaney).  Discuss.

It is an inevitable fact that the consumers of literature – laymen and literary critics alike – tend to group together texts and authors into separate categories, and attach to each category a number of supposedly ‘common’ characteristics and idiosyncracies which all its members apparently share.  Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, and their poetry, are no exceptions.  Larkin and Hughes are often linked together when discussing English poets, and do have a number of things in common: they were born within eight years of each other, they wrote and published their poetry at similar times, and both are identified with the north of England.  Both men were writing at a time when the notion of a stable and established England was being undermined, largely due to the rapid social change initiated by the termination of the Second World War.  Thus both poets were heirs to a unique poetic impulse which sought to reject the old order of modernism by employing creative and innovative forms of expression: the new consciousness of a new generation.  

Yet although Larkin and Hughes are frequently grouped together as ‘English post-war poets’, a term which suggest homogeneity, there is in reality more diversity in their approaches than is commonly assumed.  Indeed, while Larkin is categorised as member of ‘The Movement’ – a group of poets whose focus was “an emphatically English provincialism”, Hughes resists overtly making England his subject matter, choosing instead to portray elemental forces in order to distance himself from the practices of ‘The Movement’.

The Whitsun Weddings portrays different aspects of England, which all come together to create a recognisable vision of contemporary society.  The colloquialisms and ‘low’ diction employed in the collection is perfectly suited to Larkin’s focus on ‘common’ life.  Larkin’s England is a country that has been violated by the spread of industry, and is now languishing in a state of national decline, as depicted in ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ - a poem in which an image of beauty, albeit artificial and material, is violently destroyed because it is “too good for this life”.  Yet paradoxically there is an awareness that this is the only country we possess, and is therefore precious.  The Whitsun Weddings faithfully presents England as it exists, so that the reader, who is imaginatively engaged with Larkin’s poetry, is able to see with clarity England’s flaws and occasional virtues.

Larkin is fascinated by the relationship between the individual self and the landscape it inhabits.  Particular poems in The Whitsun Weddings, such as ‘Here’, depict a geographical landscape, a rather flat portrait of England beyond which Larkin then moves by linking the physical panorama to the human condition.  England is not merely a landscape, but a state of being, and a place that we inhabit physically and mentally. Yet the ultimate responsibility, that of deciding what is the matter with England, and to what extent its failings are responsible for the shortcomings of society and the individual, is left to the reader.

The success of Larkin’s poetry lies in his ability to recognise and capture common emotions and experience.  In ‘Mr Bleaney’, this sense of ordinariness, even banality, is heightened by the simplicity of language and the inclusion of unremarkable details: “stub my fags / On the same saucer-souvenir”.  The sparse description of the material surroundings shared by the absent Mr Bleaney and the poet reinforces the poverty of their comparative lives: “Flowered curtains, thin and frayed, / Fall to within five inches of the sill.”  The comfortless nature of the environment is extended to the general nature of existence.  It is only routine that can give comfort or meaning to a life that is otherwise devoid of meaning: “he kept on plugging at the four aways--/ Likewise their yearly frame”.  This sentiment is expanded in ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’, where the security of routine becomes the sole purpose of life in England:

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        Living in England has no such excuse:

        These are my customs and establishments…

        Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

In ‘Mr Bleaney’ the opening situation that is relevant only to the poet gives way to a vision that carries deep implications for all mankind.  The awareness that: “how we live measures our own nature” is endowed with poignancy by the universalisation of sentiment; the individual “I” of earlier stanzas is replaced by the generalised pronoun “we”.  It is no longer simply the predicament of the imaginative construct of Mr Bleaney: it is our predicament too.  Thus the poem is ...

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