Carol Ann Duffy and Philip Larkin Critics Quotes

Duffy and Larkin
Critics Quotes
Duffy
• “Often Duffy breaks a central line, so it looks as if we are casually
beginning a new stanza when in fact we are not – just as in the
ambiguous stages of a love affair” (Pedal)
• “there’s a persistent sense in her work that love involves as much
suffering as it does joy” (Preston)
• “Carol Ann Duffy knows the power of a repeated trio of words”
(Kellaway)
• “she leaves [the three word repetition] like a footprint” (Goodson)
• “I feel, like Beckett, that all poetry is a prayer” (Duffy)
Duffy
• “exploration of the deepest recesses of human emotion, both joy and
pain” (Elizabeth O`Reilly)
• “challenges and alters power relationships by making women both
the subject and object of love poems” (Eavan Boland)
• “moves beyond ‘a straightforward feminist poetry’ and shows ‘the
difficulty that patriarchy presents to both men and women’” (Deryn
Rees-Jones
• “she writes in everyday, conversational language” (British Council)
Duffy
• “she is a truly brilliant modern poet who has stretched our
imaginations by putting the whole range of human experience into
lines that capture the emotions perfectly” (Gordon Brown)
• “Duffy’s poetry was filled with lost loves and yearning for the past”
(Katherine Viner)
• “there are poems to make you laugh, poems to make you think and
ones you would pass on to a lover” (Judith Palmer, director of the
Poetry Society)
• “reviewers praise her touching, sensitive, witty evocations of love,
loss, dislocation, nostalgia” (Katherine Viner)
Larkin
• “[he writes] like something almost being said…it is a study of self-pity”
(Christopher Ricks)
• “he is an advocate of misanthropy and pessimism” (Bryan Appleyard)
• “Larkin’s poems are more alive in a cogitatory state than in a
sophisticated physical one” (Peter Levi)
• “Larkin is a hopeless and inflexible pessimist” (Bryan Appleyard)
• “He is much less interested in nature for its own sake than for the
opportunities it offers to moralise about the human condition”
(Andrew Motion)
Larkin
• “none of Larkin`s poems registers the achievement of complete calm
success in love” (Andrew Motion)
• “Death, in Larkin`s view, is an utterly comfortless blank. The frequency and
forcefulness with which he envisages its approach go a long way towards
explaining why he is so often regarded as an unreservedly pessimistic poet”
(Andrew Motion)
• “Larkin`s fury against women is not so much a declared stage of siege
against them personally as it is an eternal battle raging within himself”
(Janice Rossen)
• “Larkin`s interest in images is drawn from advertising because they
represent society’s collective desires and aspirations” (Andrew Swarbrick)
Larkin
• “poems such as ‘Ambulances’ and ‘An Arundel Tomb’ also want to pay
homage to human qualities of sympathy and persistence which resist
the passage of time” (Andrew Swarbrick)
• “[with reference to Sunny Prestatyn] that is exactly the reaction I want
to provoke, shock, outrage at the defacement of the poster and what
the girl stood for “ (Philip Larkin)
• “It is a poet afraid of madness who envies ‘Bleaney’ his insufferably
sane routine” (Richard Palmer)
• “[On Toads Revisited] the poem ends, almost predictably, as a quiet
celebration of work and purposefulness” (Richard Palmer)
Larkin
• “Many have seen Larkin as the ‘archetypal English poet’ because for
all his criticism and cynicism, he had a great love for his country and
his culture” (Leo Cox)
• “birth, death, funerals, love, community and marriage are all
degraded at Larkin’s hands” (Leo Cox)
• “Larkin had no emotions, no vital essences, worth looking back on,
but, siphoned all his energy, and all his love, out of the life and into
the work” (Martin Amis)
• “there is indeed a paradoxical relationship between Larkin the poet
and Larkin the man” (James Booth- the Independent)

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What are some of the recurring themes in Duffy's poetry according to the critics?

How do critics describe Larkin's view of death and love?

Duffy and Larkin

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