'A Study of Reading Habits' by Philip Larkin Critical Essay
'A Study of Reading Habits' by Philip Larkin- Critical Essay By Rhianon Cunningham 'A Study of Reading Habits' by Philip Larkin is a poem that explores loneliness. It describes three stages of the portrayed characters life where he describes how he uses books as a way of coping with his feelings of isolation in the first person. At the start, the poet writes about how as a child, the character read about heroes and villains in action adventure stories or comics. The second stanza then skips to a time when the character portrayed is a bit older and now reads horror novels. Then in the last stanza when the character is an adult, the reader is told how he has given up on books as a way of escape and has turned to alcohol instead. The speaker's solitude is conveyed through the writer's use of word choice, imagery and structure. In stanza one the reader can assume that the speaker is quite young and perhaps still at school. Larkin's use of a simple rhyming scheme (ABCBAC) acts as a symbol for the young speaker's simplicity of mind. The reader can also sense that the speaker has many problems in his life due to Larkin's use of the word 'cured', which suggests medicine, as if books were his personal painkillers. This also shows that the speaker believes his problems to be so bad that they require medical attention. The language used in the second half of the first stanza makes