Philip Larkin and the poetics of resistance

« I'm an agnostic, » the British poet Philip Larkin (1922-85) used to say, « an Anglican agnostic, of course. »

The idiosyncratic unbelief that Philip Larkin made his own in a distinguished writing career spanning five decades is typically mediated by an engaging play of bluff and counter-bluff, as seen above in his almost mock metaphysics.

What Larkin is resisting in his writings, how this is achieved, and why his texts tend to such complex ends, are among the questions explored by the thirteen specialists in this first thematically-unified volume of Larkin scholarship to be published in France.