Friday, April 20, 2018

To what extent do you agree that Philip Larkin presents women in his poetry as repeating familiar cultural stereotypes?

Philip Larkin's poetry could be defined by its morose tone. This negativity is often the consequence of an experience that the speaker of many of the poems has had with a woman. The mention of these women and the problems they cause the speaker could be a repetitive reliance on a stereotype, but Larkin's letters reveal that his life was actually full of troubled relationships with women; these problems started with his mother and continued on into adulthood with his difficult relationships with women who were love interests.
Because Larkin's letters reveal truths about his connection to specific women in his life, which may explain the patterns in his poetry, it is difficult to say whether or not the women in his poems are merely familiar tropes and stereotypes. Though art can sometimes mimic life, to say that Larkin's writings are all emotional expressions of his own ambivalence is also debatable. It is most likely that the answer to this question lies somewhere between the notion of the women in the poems as based on real life and the notion that they are simply symbolic of the challenges many men face in relation to women.

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