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As a central, highly acclaimed representative of postwar poetry in Britain whose status beyond is less conspicuous, Philip Larkin marks to some extent the death of the transnational poetic giant; from the cosmopolitan lineage of Yeats, Eliot, and Auden we arrive at a poet often characterized as exclusively English and anti-modernist, whose poetry strives toward an aesthetic of straightforwardness and accessibility. At the same time, Larkin, in his role as “people’s poet” or “unofficial laureate,” manifests a felt division between an authentic, popular, democratic poetry versus an institutionalized, elitist one. Larkin remains a frequently written-about and polarizing figure, with initial criticisms of his provincialism and, later, reactions to the racism and misogyny within his published letters opening vast and ongoing space for a scholarship of apologetics and revaluation. That is, the bulk of Larkin scholarship since the mid-1990s aims to defend his work and/or person as having been unfairly diminished or attacked; scholars routinely cite the flurry of post-letters indignation and anti-Larkin sentiments (represented in Larkin under Attack), then proceed, by various methods, to demonstrate overlooked complexities, virtues, and achievements—aspects of the man and his writing that undermine simplistic portraits (including Larkin’s self-characterizations), thereby displacing a singular version of Larkin with a myriad of identities, voices, influences, and contradictions. This basic polemic—thoroughly documented in the critical survey Evans 2017 (cited under Reference Works), whose chronology tracks a cherished-yet-fallen poet’s return to “triumph”—anticipates and overlaps to some degree the broader conflicts embedded in terms like political correctness, cancel culture, toxic masculinity, and identity politics, yet has also, in a manner recalling the Joseph Conrad debates instigated by Chinua Achebe, brought to Larkin familiar disputes regarding the proper boundaries of literary scholarship, and the question of whether the artist and/or their politics can be separated from what Larkin once called the “sole freshly created universe” of the poetic text. Across the various categories and chronologies found in this bibliography some notable trends prevail: 1) an approach to Larkin’s poetry as a system of conflicted binaries (Swarbrick’s “aesthete/philistine” paradigm, Motion’s empiricist/symbolist split, Carey’s dueling speech registers, etc.); 2) a recognition of Larkin’s unique use of persona, which tends to complicate the lines between poet and speaker, life and text; and 3) a (contested) effort to analyze Larkin in relation to place—be it city, region, nation, or empire—and within the complicating developments of a post-imperial consciousness and globalized market.

This article investigates the use of swearing in Philip Larkin’s poetry in relation to English class struggle. The word ‘fuck’, specifically—which was used scandalously by the Sex Pistols around the same time Larkin’s High Windows was published—evokes class tension and intensifies questions of who can say what, and where. Ultimately, Larkin’s swear-poems reposition contemporary political and generational conflict as natural and timeless conditions.

I n a letter to Faber editor Charles Monteith, dated March 2, 1978, Philip Larkin presented two quatrains. The first was his contribution to the Queen's Jubilee, to be inscribed in stone outside the Faber & Faber offices in Queen Square. With a characteristically dismissive and self-deprecating air?"I'm no good at this lapidary lark"?Larkin relinquishes the following lines for "first British chiselling rights"

This article defines the music category “indie rock” not just as an aesthetic genre, but as a method of social differentiation as well as a marketing tool. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of “cultural capital,” it draws a parallel between indie rock and high art, both of which depend upon a lack of popularity for their value, and require specialized knowledge to be fully appreciated. In its attempt to locate indie rock at the intersection of various artistic, social, and commercial phenomena, the article engages in detailed analysis of particular artists, songs, lyrics, websites, and reviews, from which it concludes that this relatively new genre is part of an old and familiar social structure.

This essay argues that Ted Hughes's Crow presents an alternative theological paradigm that rescues certain elements of Being—in particular the feminine and the demonic—often repressed within the Christian tradition. Through the resurrection of an Earth Goddess, Hughes's paradigm restores divinity to the natural world, and supplements the one-sidedness of Trinitarian doctrine. Crow, as a character, dramatises humanity's estrangement from the Goddess, and thus from the unconscious life that created it. By lending expression to what otherwise remains dangerously repressed in the uncon scious, Crow participates in the healthy psychological process Jung calls individuation. The violent and grotesque nature of Ted Hughes's Crow has left critics the delicate task of determining whether or not the volume has redeeming value. Those opposed to Crow find it lacking in hope and human perspective: Geoffrey Thurley calls Crow a 'somewhat inhuman, even brutal book',1 while Calvin Bedient concludes that Crow is 'the croak of nihilism itself'.2 Hughes's defenders find in Crow not only a human perspective but a kind of psycho logical healing power. Contrasting Hughes to the Movement poets, Annie Schofield praises his direct dealing with post-atomic psychological crises.3 Keith Sagar compares Hughes to a shaman, his function being to 'make the dangerous journey, on behalf of his society, into the spirit world ... into his own unconscious'.4 But Crow's value extends beyond a nebulous and mys tical probing of the psyche: Crow redeems itself by presenting an alternative theological paradigm that rescues certain elements of Being and expression often repressed within the Christian tradition. It is typical of critics to enter their discussions of Crow with some notion of an imaginative 'world' with definable characteristics. Leonard Scigaj, for instance, finds in Crow a 'magical world of fable and primitive trickster narrative ... with a set of motifs that evaluate modem Western culture'.5 Similarly, Egbert Faas discusses a 'supratemporal world of global religious Literature & Theology 17/1 © Oxford University Press 2003; all rights reserved. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.64 on Tue, 19 Apr 2016 04:33:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms i8 TED HUGHES'S CROW dimensions in which Western myths figure side by side with the Tibetan Buddhist Womb Door or an Eskimo Genesis'.6 It may be added to these that the world of Crow, and to some extent the world of Hughes's poetry in general,7 inverts the hierarchy of Being established in Genesis, where an external male God gives man dominion 'over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth'. In Crow the divine source of creation is nature herself, symbolically represented as an earth goddess; the external Christian God is an invention of man who usurps her throne. Consciousness marks the 'fall' of humanity from its true parent, who looms angrily over her temporary oppressors. In emphasising the holiness of the natural world, and imbuing its landscape with characteristics of the feminine and the demonic, Crow bites back at a strand of more orthodox thought present in the theological writings of C.S. Lewis. In God in the Dock, published one year before Crow, Lewis defends a theological system largely dismissive of these same elements of Being. He delineates instead an all-masculine, all-benevolent God, wholly independent of his creation. Whereas Hughes locates divinity within the regenerative processes of nature, the natural world remains for Lewis a mere imitation of an abstract though masculine ideal: 'The corn itself is in its far-off way an imitation of supernatural reality; the dying, and coming again, descending, and re-ascending beyond all nature. The principle is there in nature because it was first there in God Himself' Gender and morality are likewise subjected in Lewis's paradigm to a rigid hierarchical construct. Reluctant to award the demonic an integral place within the forces of life, he complains that dualism 'gives evil a positive, substantive, self-consistent nature, like that of good', whereas a 'sound theory ... demands that good should be original and evil a mere perversion'.10 Elsewhere, declaring that 'we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him',11 Lewis upholds masculinity as an ideal principle, therefore sustaining the old Platonic binaries and their skewed emphases. While Lewis's theology concerns itself with separation and subordination, Hughes's alternative aims toward reintegration. In this way Crow participates within Jung's vision of psycho-spiritual maturation. John Dourley defines Jung's work as a revision to Trinitarian symbol and doctrine, in which a 'goddess' representative of the collective unconscious is fitted into the equation.12 Like Hughes's poetry, Jung's psychology is committed to the reconciliation of severed levels of Being; by giving conscious life to what is otherwise repressed within the unconscious, it labours toward a reintegrated psychic whole. Jung uses the term individuation to describe the process by which one becomes 'a psychological "in-dividual", that is, a separate, indivisible unity or "whole" \13 That process first involves a plunge downward into the This content downloaded from 207.46.13.64 on Tue, 19 Apr 2016 04:33:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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