Life and death in Philip Larkin's poetry : an analytical study of at grass, next please, Mr. Bleaney and the Treesinstructor

Abstract EN

The present study is concerned with the analysis of few poems by the English poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985).

What attracts the researcher's attention is the recurring theme of life and death that the poet tackles continuously using a traditional systematic structure.

Larkin is "an excellent example of the plain style in modern times", writes Tijana Stojkovic.* His poems are easy but all discuss a serious topic in life, a topic which is everybody's concern in contemporary life.

Larkin achieved acclaim on the strength of an extremely small body of work , just over one hundred pages of poetry in four slender volumes.

These collections, especially The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows, present the kind of poetry from which even people who distrust poetry can take comfort and delight, for the poet produced the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable body of verse during the last twenty-five years.

This research paper aims at finding few reasons behind Larkin's strange views about modernity and is to find out why people think that life is miserable.

These are reflected outstandingly in the poems chosen for analysis in this paper.

The research is divided into three sections.

The first one presents Larkin's biography and Career as a poet and tackles the themes used and repeated in his poems : At Grass, Next Please, Mr.

Bleaney and The Trees.

The second section presents the relationship between Larkin and the Movement.

The third section is an analysis of common themes of "life and death", with reference to the endless hopes of the human beings in the chosen poems.