critical views

• "There is a lucidity of language which invites understanding even when the ideas expressed are paradoxical or complex"

  ~Peter R. King (clarity of Larkin's writing)
• 'Larkin seldom presents himself as anything but the onlooker'

  ~James Naremore - (Larkin's perspective in his poems)
• 'His writing is driven by a sense of failure in both'

  ~Andrew Swarbrick - (Larkin's life and work)
• 'Larkin's poetry is the pursuit of difference'

  ~Andrew Swarbrick
• 'At the centre of Larkin's poetry is the pursuit of self-definition, a self which feels threatened by the proximity of others but which fears that without relationship with otherness the self has no validity'- Andrew Swarbrick
• Larkin feels as if one is defined by their connections and relationships- Andrew Swarbrick
• 'Don't judge me by them. Some are better than me, but I add up to more than they do'- Philip Larkin
• 'Larkin presents himself as a skeptical, less deceived observer of contemporary life'- James Naremore
• 'Let me remember that the only married state I know (i.e that of my parents) is bloody hell. Never must it be forgotten'- Philip Larkin
• 'Absolutely contrary to nature, both because men cannot help desiring many women and because women in any case become undesirable at twenty-six'- Philip Larkin
• Larkin's collection presents 'a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people, can take comfort and delight'- X. J. Kennedy
• Larkin produced 'the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any English poet in the last 25 years'- Alan Brownjohn
• Larkin 'avoided the literary, the metropolitan, the group label, and embraced the nonliterary, the provincial and the purely personal'- Alun R. Jones
• Larkin wrote 'in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires'- J. D. McClatchy
• Larkin was 'the saddest heart of the post-war supermarket'- Eric Homberger.
• 'Duffy's concern with the duplicitous nature of language is matched by a concern for the way language can alienate, creating a sense of otherness and distance'- Bernard O'Keeffe
• 'Many of Duffy's poems echo themes of Larkin's'- Justin Quinn
• 'She has an optimistic side that Larkin did not, most visible in her many love poems'- Jody Allen-Randolph
• 'I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn, and thin on top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the ace of death'- Duffy
• 'Duffy shares Larkin's tragic views of life...loneliness haunts her verse'- Jody Allen-Randolph
• 'With a lot of artists, the mystique is to baffle their readership. She never does that. Her aim is to communicate'- Calvin Tomkins
• 'She was the first poet to push language and form, their limits and tensions, to articulate that bankrupt and dislocated era'- Lavinia Greenlaw
• 'I does for me; I don't believe in god'- Duffy saying poetry replaces religion in her secular life.
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  'I write quite a lot of sonnets and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite'- Duffy
• 'Poetry and prayer are very similar'- Duffy
• 'Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion'- Duffy
• 'There was a mixture of direct address and something slightly surreal, fanciful, tender-hearted and whimsical'- Andrew Motion
• 'She is extraordinarily well balanced, in her work and in her life'- Andrew Motion
• Duffy moves beyond 'a straightforward feminist poet' and shows 'the difficulties that patriarchy present to both men and women'- Deryn Reese-Jones