Larkin's Blues

A jazz and blues enthusiast, poet Philip Larkin drew upon both kinds of music as a model for his poetry. This work seeks to demonstrate the extent to which Larkin's "jazz life" informed his poetry and also effectively articulates the wider confluence of music and poetry.

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A jazz and blues enthusiast, poet Philip Larkin drew upon both kinds of music as his model for a poetry that would oppose the modernism of Eliot and Pound. This work seeks to demonstrate the extent to which Larkin's "jazz life", as he referred to it, informed his poetry and but also effectively articulates the wider confluence of music and poetry. The study incorporates jazz and blues criticism and discussion of such artists as Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, and the Beatles to illustrate the significance of musical intertext in Larkin's poetry. Although this work analyzes the place of jazz and other forms of popular music in Larkin's texts, it also considers the philistine manner that dictated, among other things, Larkin's antimodernist stance; the persona he assumes in his poems and reviews; his use of common language; his conception of his audience; and his position on the direction English poetry should take in the 20th century.