“Doing” ecocriticism: Oppressions of nature and animals in Philip Larkin’s poetry

Abstract

Far fewer studies have investigated Philip Larkin’s ecological awareness. While the poet problematizes physical nature and animals, the universal, east-and-west concerns of (non) human beings have been predominantly one-dimensional. This paper analyzes Larkin’s poetry, by paying specific attention to the poet’s precognition of a looming disaster that ecocritics and environmentalists later came to conceptualize as “the ecological crisis.” This article analyzes two poems by Larkin, chiefly, “Going, Going,” and “Take One Home for the Kiddies” in the context of natural environment and animal oppression. Larkin’s arguments on the human manipulation of nature eventually disrupl ts the Man-Nature relationship. By focusing on these two of Larkin’s poems, the wider application of rhetorical devices attests to the poet’s sensitivity, delineating an unstable alliance between human and non-human world(s).