The Psychological Crisis: Navigating the Tension Between Home and Homelessness in Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin's poetry often grapples with a conflict between affinity for and alienation from his homeland. Larkin's literary career thrived throughout the mid-20th century, a period marked by significant transformations in British thinking and society as a result of the Second World War. Larkin, the acknowledged Unofficial Poet Laureate of England, maintains strong connections to regional or national identities throughout his lifetime. Commonly, Larkin is referred to as a poet of Englishness. The protagonists in Larkin's works inherently embody the poet's own personality. The Larkin persona lacks a feeling of attachment to his childhood hometown of Coventry when he revisits it after ten years, as it does not evoke any nostalgia in him. The location of his birth and upbringing does not exert any influence on his recollection, resulting in a sense of alienation from his previous life. Larkin went between several geographical locations while serving as a librarian at various colleges or universities. Larkin expressed in his letter to Monica Jones that neither Hull nor any other place truly felt like home to him, following a fifteen-year residence there. Larkin declined to be constrained by his affiliation with his temporary residence. For Larkin, belonging to a place is not always a matter of choice, but rather an inevitable circumstance. The possession of a rented room, which might be described as a 'one hired box', induces a sense of belonging crisis in a Larkin speaker. The objective of this dissertation is to examine Larkin's conflicting emotions of belonging and non-belonging towards home in several of his poems.