Begin Afresh - Kumar Chatterjee, Sisir

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Résumé :

Contents

Foreword x

Acknowledgements xii

Abbreviations xiv

1 Introduction 1

1 I Remember, I Remember 1

2 Larkin's Status as a Poet 2

3 Critical Controversies 4

4 The Evolution of Larkin's Poetry 9

5 Begin Afresh: A Re-Evaluation 13

6 Methodology 14

Notes 15

2 Early Poems to The North Ship (1938-1945) 17

1 Juvenile Poems 17

2 Brunette Coleman Poems: Sugar and Spice 22

3 The North Ship: Poeticisms, Rhetorical Hi-Jinks, and Innovative Imitation 27

(i) A Fortuitous First Volume 27

(ii) Poetical Poems 29

(iii) Yeats-y Poems 33

(iv) Audenesque Poems 36

(v) Gendered Poems 38

(vi) Eros-Thanatos Poems 42

(vii) Carpe diem 43

(viii) Purist Aestheticism 44

(ix) Poems of Poetic Vocation 46

Notes 48

3 From Novelist to Poet 50

1 The Novels and D?bats 50

2 Biographical Pressures 62

3 Crisis: In the Grip of Light and XX Poems 64

4 Britain's Political Transition 71

5 The Movement 73

6 Anti-Romanticism and Anti-Modernism 79

7 Religion, Consumerism, Permissive Society and Race Relations 84

Notes 87

4 The Less Deceived: Clear-eyed Realism and Demotic Poetics 89

1 Deceptions and Illusions 89

2 Come and Choose Wrong: Choice 94

3 Threadbare Perspectives: Triple Time 99

4 Admirer and Admired: Beyond Cynicism 107

5 A Disoccurrence 110

6 My Darling 111

7 Catching Happiness 112

8 Oblivion and Self-Transcendence 113

9 Elegy 116

10 Celebration 118

11 Awkward Reverence 121

Notes 125

5 The Whitsun Weddings: Larkin at the Zenith 127

1 Serio-Comic Poems 127

2 How Life Should Be: Advertisement Poems 135

3 Life's Victims 140

4 Something Hidden From Us: Alter Ego Poems 144

5 When We Start To Die: Poems of Failure and Death 150

6 What Will Survive Of Us 155

7 An Enormous Yes 162

8 The End of Larkin's Marriage Debate: 1963-1964 169

9 Epithalamium 170

Notes 176

6 High Windows: The Quotidian and the Transcendent 179

1 Screaming for More: Public Poems 179

2 Secondary Inspirations 183

3 The Strength and Pain / Of Being Young 187

4 Uncontradicting Solitude 191

5 Self-Satire 194

6 Your Mum and Dad 197

7 Very Corny 198

8 The Eggs Unbroken 200

9 You Give For Ever 201

10 Living 202

11 The Sad Song of Money 208

12 It Didn't Work For Them Or Me 210

13 O World, / Your Loves, Your Chances 211

14 Let It Always Be There 218

Notes 223

7 Larkin After High Windows 227

1 Furnace-Fear 227

2 Betty Mackereth: The Love Poems of 1975-1976 233

3 It Never Worked For Me 241

4 We Should Be Kind / While There Is Still Time 244

5 A Lyric Moment 246

6 Friendly Doggerels 246

7 Occasional Poems 247

8 The Last Poem 249

9 It Is By Bridges That We Live 250

Notes 256

8 Conclusion 257

1 Pessimism 257

2 Lyricism 260

3 From Personal to Universal 261

4 The Ordinary 264

5 Transcendence 265

6 Larkin's Achievement 270

Notes 271

Bibliography

Index