Philip Larkin. The Silent Herald

Academic Paper from the year 2014 in the subject English - Literature, Works, Ranchi University , language: English, comment: The current work is a humble attempt at portraying Philip Larkin as an acute and sympathetic observer, a reflection of his genius, which particularly distinguish his oeuvre., abstract: Percy Bysshe Shelley once said, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". To Shelley, a poet was a sort of a prophet, a foreseer, a foreboder, a minister who administrated the deepest truths and was next only to God. Reverting from this transcendence, Wordsworth looked upon the poet as "a man speaking to men" and not some superhuman creature, one whose emotions and feelings were in no way different from those of ordinary men and women. To level the fact more plainly, Philip Larkin was all that and a little more. He himself once said about his poems, that they should give his readers the feeling of "a chap chatting to chaps". The present essay endeavours to show Philip Larkin as a distant yet sympathetic observer of various aspects of life.