Begin Afresh: The Evolution of Philip Larkin's Poetry

Begin Afresh: The Evolution of Philip Larkin’s Poetry offers incisive, insightful and yet lucid analyses of all the individual poems contained in the four major collections of Larkin (1922–1985).

It also deals with his “Juvenile Poems”, Brunette Coleman poems, those in In the Grip of Light and XX Poems, as well as his last poems. The book also discusses Larkin’s novels and débats. It evaluates the critical opinions regarding various aspects of Larkin’s poetry, especially the issue of its development, and shows that it may not follow a clearly identifiable, linear, chronological line of evolution, but it does evolve in a subtle way from one phase of his career to the next. The book explores how Larkin discovered his own original, inimitable, idiosyncratic poetic voice by truly democratising English poetry for the first time, by writing accessible and pleasurable poetry, and by forging a new poetic out of a philistine aesthetic, which stands out as an artistic holotype. It shows how Larkin restores the relation between poetry and the reading public, a relation which was broken down by Modernist poets. It also establishes how his poetic vision is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic in that it “preserves” the universal human condition without moralising or philosophising. The book aims to make a fresh departure in Larkin criticism and mark a new era in Larkin studies.

This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of Modernism, twentieth-century literature, poetry, language and literature.

Sisir Kumar Chatterjee is Associate Professor at Hooghly Mohsin College, Burdwan University, West Bengal, India. His first monograph on Philip Larkin was published in 2006 and he has published extensively on fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He co-edited The World of Agha Shahid Ali (2021) and is currently co-editing Arundhati Roy: Political, Ethical and Aesthetic Perspectives and a book on Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge. His novel Burning Burning was published in 2022.