Irony In Philip Larkin's Poetry

Brooks’ essay primarily, is a model of the contextual reality, where the reality of the text is realized in its context; so a text is deeply woven into the complex reality of the context. The statements in a poem bear the pressure of the context and meanings of universal significance rise from the poem through the use of Irony, which, a poet uses in the structure of a poem. This paper primarily deals with the epistemological reality of the Poiesis (Creation) and its Hermeneutics (Interpretation), which has been stated by Cleanth Brooks in the essay, ‘Irony as Principle of Structure’, through ‘Detachment’ in Philip Larkin’s poetry. Brooks, who is a Formalist, expounds the epistemic process of the creation of a text and its interpretation by placing it within a complex edifice of: Author—Text—Reader Irony which is inextricably intertwined into the creative faculty of human imagination, plays freely with Metaphors. It works through the metaphysics of absence, gap, slippage, fissures, hymn and aporia. Irony is explained as the string which helps the

His poetry through irony and metaphor shows the universality of relationships, be it parent and child (as in the case of “This be the Verse”), lover and the beloved, husband and wife, a neighbor, an acquaintance, between humans as in a society or even the relation of a body to its soul. Where on one hand, he is of the opinion to shrug the relations off; he, through irony, is making the reader all the more aware of their eternal presence. Hence, the poetic person is a careful observer of his own behavior and the others’. Being a detached person who is moved deeply by what he sees, his response to the observed reality is ‘Sensitive’, despite the touches of Irony, hence, making human relationships inevitable to condemn, yet condemning them through ironical portrayal of the context. In Brooks’