Buddhist Psychology in the Poetry of Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin is not ordinarily thought of as a Buddhist. Larkin was -- in the opinion of many literary critics -- the quintessential English poet of the latter half of the twentieth century, and the world (and worldview) captured in his poems is largely one that reflects Britain in its new post-war and post-imperial identity. To some extent this made Larkin's poetry a clear-eyed examination of a society in the process of making do with less -- this is, I think, the meaning behind Larkin's often-quoted caustic comment, regarding the sources of his poetic inspiration, that "deprivation is for me what daffodils are for Wordsworth." But the simple fact is that Larkin is basically a pessimist, and it seems that in many cases -- most famously Schopenhauer, in addition to the long list of European writers who were directly influenced by Schopenhauerian thought -- pessimism in the European literary and philosophical tradition ends up approaching many of the tenets of "Eastern" religious thought or philosophical insight the long way around, as it were. In other words, we may not know how Larkin felt or thought about Buddhism per se, but it is apparent that Larkin's poetry can be used to illustrate perfectly some aspects of Buddhist thought and psychology. After all, the European lyric poem is, in its own way, a form of contained verbal meditation: it reaches a conclusion wherein the concluding thought cannot necessarily be grasped by logic, like a syllogistic argument. In this, I think we can approach a European lyric poem as though it were something more like a Zen Buddhist koan or a form of achieved Vipassana, a meditative insight into the nature of reality which is certainly understandable within classical Buddhist terms. I would like to use two of Larkin's better known poems, "This Be The Verse" and "High Windows," both from his 1974 collection entitled High Windows, in order to approach some basic tenets of Buddhist psychology: without making any claims of direct influence, I think we can nonetheless use these poems as illustrations of some basic Buddhist concepts.
Larkin's "This Be The Verse" is perhaps his single most famous poem, although the shock of its opening line still...
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