Critical quotes
Cards (20)
- "laureate of a post-christian, secular England"
- "genuine attempt to highlight and give focus to the plight of the disadvantaged other"
- Larkin on the church: "social cement in a disintegrative age "
- "poetry and prayer are very similar"
- "anglican agnostic"
- “Duffy shares Larkin’s tragic view of life… loneliness haunts her verse”
- “Poetry of disappointment of the destruction of romantic illusions”
- “accessible and entertaining”
- “Larkin’s main fear was that if he got married he would end up imitating his parents’ misery”
- “in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about the stunted lives and spoiled desires”
- “many of Duffy’s poems echo themes of Larkin’s”
- “Carol Ann Duffy’s use of the dramatic monologue allows mostly marginalised social types a voice.”
- ‘It can have a terrible immediacy, almost like an ambush, like being thumped’
- "and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death"
- The voice of 'the man next door' writes about 'the daily, the ordinary, the domestic'
- 'anxieties about the idea of the unsayable, and the unplaceable.'
- Duffy presents "disappointed figures in need of comfort in dark and potentially comfort less world'"
- “Then, for a while, the world around me sort of forced me to be more political.”
- ‘All his values and attitudes were utterly, even fanatically negative.’
- “Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness,”