Englishness In The Poetry By Thomas Hardy And Philip Larkin

During this age of globalization in which various cultures are integrated, English poetry is heavily influenced by foreign factors. However, best known for adopting the traditional poetic techniques to reveal the life of ordinary people, Englishness in the poetry by Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin has been gaining more and more critical attention since the 1970s. An important study has been Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973) by Donald Davie, who maintains in his book that there is a "Hardy tradition" in English poetry and how successive poets, particularly Larkin, have fallen under Hardy's spell. It is a similar response in another important study English Movement Poetics (1998) by Dr. Fu Hao in China, which has been the only Chinese critical work on Larkin's poetry so far.It is generally accepted that poetry is to be analyzed in close reading from the perspective of New Criticism, while Marxist approach is used to examine realistic novels. However, by concerning with English people and their landscapes, the poetry by Hardy and Larkin is empirical and documentary, which should not be abstracted from a socio-historical context. Thus this paper from a new Marxist perspective examines the particular poems by the two poets, with emphasis on the unique Englishness in their poetry.The opening chapter introduces poetic contribution of Hardy and Larkin in order to show Englishness is their common characteristic. Chapter Two presents the theory by Gy(o|¨)rgy Lukács and the socio-historical context of the two poets. Demonstrated in Chapter Three and Four is Englishness represented as empiricism in content and traditionalism in form and style. The two poets both deal with the life of contemporary English people, English landscape and English ideology, and they both find traditional form, colloquial diction and ironic tone quite adequate for their purposes. However, their respective socio-historical background determines the difference that compared with Hardy, Larkin is more pessimistic in content and more innovative in form and style. The final chapter is concerned with influence of Englishness on contemporary English poetry.The value of Englishness lies in the literary patriotism to preserve English tradition. Actually, Englishness in the poetry by Hardy and Larkin functions as an example for their followers that they should concern the life of contemporary English people and preserve and continue their own culture as well as English poetic tradition.