| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,100,000)
Fiscal Year 1998: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
Fiscal Year 1996: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
My main concern in this project has been the poetry of Philip Larkin. I chose some of the major pieces from his Collected Poems and investigated the background of these works, paying special attention to his letters and biography. I also studied the poet's manuscripts held in the Larkin Archive analysing words, rhymes and poetic form to elucidate prominent stylistic features of his work. This study resulted in an article "Larkinesque Ambiguity" published in 1997. The article focuses on 'Wedding-Wind' and 'An Arundel Tomb'. It argues that these poems explore the delicate feelings of people in love through the use of profoundly quivocal words, 'ravel' and 'lie'. I aIso suggest here that the ambiguous feelings about women revealed in these poems echo, in a rather ironic fashion, Larkin's own experiences.
In 1998 I published a book, Stylistic Criticism of English Poetry : Veats, Larkin and Others, which is primarily concerned with modern poetry. My discussion here is founded on close reading of selected poems. In some chapters I depart from previous criticism by trying to elucidate the close-knit and hitherto ignored, verbal structures underlying the poems. As biographical details often seem to impinge on study of Larkin's work. I took account of them in my analysis of his poetry.
In addition to the poems dealt with in my book, I am now working on other pieces by Yeats and Larkin and am concentrating on these poets' use of rhyme schemes.
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