SOURCE: "Style and Language," in An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man: A Study of Philip Larkin 's Poetry, 191 A, pp. 19-42.

Below, Kuby examines Larkin's place among British poets, specifically his relationship to the modernist school.

Facets of Larkin's style point to several progenitors. In many ways his differences from the modern tradition resemble Ben Jonson's differences from his own contemporaries. Both tend to avoid extended metaphor, strings of similes, and other rhetorical elaborations which in Jonson's time were called 'conceits', or 'bravery' of language. The poems of both have prose sense and a ready surface intelligibility due, in part, in both cases, to the fact that the poems are organized by rational rather than by emotional or imagistic sequences. Both express themselves succinct ly, attempting, as Jonson put it, "what man can say / In a little", the poetic impulse being toward reduction and condensation rather than...