Philip Larkin's Ambivalent Attitudes toward Past Life

This paper will examine the way Philip Larkin as a modern poet views unfavorable but inescapable past experiences with ambivalent attitudes. Larkin has written poems which concern the matters of time, aging, and death. Out of these related themes, the past has offered one major subject for Larkin's poems. Those poems on his personal experiences, coming out of his deep interest in the past and in the relationship the past has with his present and future life, reveal much of the poet's personality. Because of Larkin's conflicting attitudes towards past life, however, the poems about his past create both ambivalence and attraction in the readers' minds. The unusual restraint of emotion and conflict revealed in the poems about past life render rare modern lyrics that are unlike exuberant romantic poems.