How Did Yeats Influence Philip Larkin

This paper examines Yeats’ influence on Philip Larkin. We know that Larkin was a national favourite poet who was commonly referred to as “England’s other Poet Laureate”. As Larkin has said that he spent three years trying to write like Yeats. Larkin imitated Yeats in a fairly direct way, admitting that he had been swept away by Yeats’ music, and appropriating the image as well as the romantic and melancholy tone of his early Celtic Period. Larkin’s early work shows the influence of Yeats. His first book, The North Ship, published in 1945 at his own expense, reflects his early infatuation with Yeats. Afterwards The Less Deceived, published in 1955, marked Larkin as an up-and-coming poet. The title itself makes clear Larkin’s newfound disillusionment with Yeats and modernism in general. Two more collections followed at similarly lengthy intervals: The Whitsun Weddings (1965), considered by many to be his finest achievement, and his last collection High Windows (1974), confirmed him as one of the finest poets in English Literary History.
Keywords: Modernist, Symbolist, Yeatsian, Metaphor, Movement. Philip Larkin, the British poet, novelist, essayist and a jazz critic was a leading voice of the Movement poetry which pervaded English Literature in the Post-World War II period. This man invented the name “The Movement” in 1953 for the work of a number of poets who included Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie and D.J. Enright. Larkin’s poems