Imágenes de Philip Larkin

Abstract

This paper intends to analyse some of Philip Larkin's poems in which animals play a major role. Made up into a sort of personal bestiary, some of the topics which characterize Philip Larkin's poetical world turn up in these poems. These topics are also constituent elements of our contemporary world: the manifestations of coercion of an efficient but fuzzy power, indifference to human cruelty, dehumanizing science or selfish insensibility in the face of the suffering of others. Through animals, and in most cases domestic animals, the poet establishes a distance-in an indirect way-between himself and the reader and between the reader and the problems in question, problems which require an expressive ability that allows one to speak of poetry without shortening the necessary critical distance.