The Material Imagination: Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hardy

Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between physicality and imagination in the poetry of Philip Larkin, focusing on different kinds of literal and imaginative space. I adduce two major influences, D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, who appealed to Larkin as a self-proclaimed ‘materialist’ (Letters to Monica, p. 15). He admired these writers for their ability not only to capture a ‘tough rich sense of life’, but crucially ‘to relate any given part of life to the rest of it’. Material details are not incidental, but illuminate ‘the person’s whole life, & the state of their world’. Likewise, Larkin was intrigued by spaces, objects, and daily routines not in isolation, but rather by how they reflect or even shape human behaviour. I refute the common critical assumption that his poetry was limited by its empiricism. Writing about the fabric of everyday life was his way of thinking about the nature of existence itself. The introduction establishes Larkin’s lifelong interest in the ‘strange reciprocity’ (The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, p. 320) between mind and matter. I clarify my use of the term ‘the material imagination’ and acknowledge my debt to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958). I justify my inclusion of Lawrence and Hardy, explaining why I chose to prioritise these figures over Larkin’s direct contemporaries such as the other Movement writers. I argue that they provide unique insights into his mind. Larkin’s literary engagement with Lawrence has been neglected, while there has never been a full-length study of this trio. Lawrence himself read and wrote about Hardy, so there is a clear intellectual genealogy to be explored. Chapter 1 is concerned with the intimate space of ‘home’, delving into Larkin’s fascination with domestic interiors and dwelling places. At this stage I focus on Larkin alone, laying the groundwork for the rest of the thesis. Larkin returned to the idea of finding one’s ‘proper ground’ (CP, p. 29), examining the complex relationship between inhabitant and inhabited space. Many poems yearn for refuge, but how can we reconcile this ‘hanker[ing] for the homeliness / Of den, and hole, and set’ (CP, p. 318) with the rented rooms and landscapes of suburban alienation in his poetry, and indeed his own life? I argue that his inability to realise the dream of domesticity actually sanctifies the concept of home; it remains an untouched and untouchable ideal. Chapter 2 explores another side of the material imagination, looking at spatial aspects of the way we think. How do we picture ‘unfenced existence’ (CP, p. 49), for example? I shift from the local ‘here’ to the luminous dream of ‘beyond’, identifying Hardy as a parallel. Both writers are known for their depictions of everyday life, yet they were also drawn to the immaterial and ineffable. I revisit their sense of the transcendent, focusing on lonely environments, absences, and disembodied states of being. Chapter 3 introduces time as space, exploring the workings of memory and anticipation in order to understand Larkin’s ‘long perspectives / Open at each instant of our lives’ (CP, p. 68). Lawrence, Larkin’s ‘touchstone against the false’ (Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, p. 131), is important here. I suggest that Larkin was fascinated by Lawrence’s ability to relate the instant to the eternal, and this informed his approach to epiphanic experience well beyond the 1940s. Chapter 4 develops this discussion of ‘long perspectives’ in relation to churches. I investigate Larkin’s ‘moment of ecstasy’ (The Philip Larkin I Knew, p. 74), Lawrence’s ‘incarnate moment’ (Phoenix, p. 221), and Hardy’s ‘moments of vision’ (The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, p. 459) in the context of sacred space. There is a shade of the Angry Young Man about Larkin, railing against the purposelessness of his age – and yet for a man who could be so derisive of organized religion and the apparent self-deception it entails, he returned to the dynamics of the Church with a kind of secular devotion. Even if he did not believe in a Christian God, following Hardy and Lawrence, he gravitated to forms of worship that express and partially fulfil our desire to transcend ourselves. Finally, in Chapter 5 I turn from ‘somewhere’, ‘anywhere’, and ‘elsewhere’ to ‘nowhere’. As established in Chapter 4, Larkin, Lawrence, and Hardy were all drawn to Christianity but ultimately rejected faith. How did they make sense of death in a heavenless world? I analyse different representations of darkness, death, and nescience, approaching nothingness as an unbounded conceptual space. I end the chapter, and indeed the thesis, by considering afterlives, asking whether literature vouchsafed these writers a form of immortality and whether this afforded them any consolation. The work itself becomes an imaginative space where experience can perpetuate itself endlessly.