Culture, Ordinary Experience and Larkin’s Poetry
Culture, Ordinary Experience and Larkin’s Poetry

Summary/Abstract: For more than two decades, Philip Larkin was unofficially called the Poet Laureate of Britain. His poems dealt with what had been seen at that time as the ordinary experience of ordinary British subjects. He had been a controversial poet from the beginning of his career, more precisely from his rise to literary prominence with his second collection, The Less Deceived. Many factors led to his being controversial and associated with unillusioned, down-to-earth, ordinary people, with no aspiration to the elevated thoughts and feelings that Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, published more than a century before the above-mentioned collection, had called “culture” as “the best that has been thought and said in the world” (Arnold 6). The current article both examines ways in which a new view on culture links prominent figures of the Birmingham School of Contemporary Cultural Studies and Larkin’s poetry, but also how this poetry transcends the ordinariness of daily human experience through its crafting into art.

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