Post-Romantic beauty and truth: The poetry of Philip Larkin

The following thesis explores the issue of ambiguity in Philip Larkin's poetry, especially with regard to his Movement (anti-Romantic) background and his Romantic influences. His position has been established as "post-Romantic," in that the Keatsian concepts of beauty and truth are important in his poetics, but primarily as two opposite starting-points. These are brought together through a poetic compromise in his best achievements.;The first chapter gives an overview of the Movement's ambivalent nature, particularly in relation to Romanticism, and Larkin's place in it. The following two chapters examine Larkin's poems which come closest to his Romantic and his Movement impulses: the beauty poems and the truth poems respectively. The distinction between the two groups of poems can be traced on the stylistic level. Symbolism and imagery prevail in the former group, while rhetoric and dominate the latter group. The last chapter suggests that he compromise between these Romantic and Movement standpoints is found in the poems of epiphany, which are characterized by an interplay of the symbolist and the rhetorical stylistic modes.