Critical quotes

Cards (20)

  • "laureate of a post-christian, secular England"

    Booth (Larkin)
  • "genuine attempt to highlight and give focus to the plight of the disadvantaged other"

    Deryn Rees Jones (Duffy)
  • Larkin on the church: "social cement in a disintegrative age "

    Ezard
  • "poetry and prayer are very similar"

    Duffy
  • Dad "never believe in God"
    "anglican agnostic"

    Larkin
  •  “Duffy shares Larkin’s tragic view of life… loneliness haunts her verse”
    Randolph
  • “Poetry of disappointment of the destruction of romantic illusions”
    Peter J King (Larkin)
  • “accessible and entertaining”
    Viner (Duffy)
  • “Larkin’s main fear was that if he got married he would end up imitating his parents’ misery”
    Andrew Motion
  •  “in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about the stunted lives and spoiled desires”
    J.D McLathy (Larkin)
  • “many of Duffy’s poems echo themes of Larkin’s”
    Justin Quinn
  • “Carol Ann Duffy’s use of the dramatic monologue allows mostly marginalised social types a voice.”
    Gregson
  • ‘It can have a terrible immediacy, almost like an ambush, like being thumped’
    Duffy on grief after death
  • "and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death"

    Duffy about Larkin
  • The voice of 'the man next door' writes about 'the daily, the ordinary, the domestic'
    Armitage
  • 'anxieties about the idea of the unsayable, and the unplaceable.'
    Deryn Rees Jones
  • Duffy presents "disappointed figures in need of comfort in dark and potentially comfort less world'"
    Cash
  • “Then, for a while, the world around me sort of forced me to be more political.”
    Duffy on Thatcher
  • ‘All his values and attitudes were utterly, even fanatically negative.’
    Amis
  • “Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness,”

    Phillip Larkin about his work as a librarian in Hull, in a letter to Monica Jones 1955