Frank o'Connor

1903-1966

Frank O'Connor is generally regarded as one of the best short-story writers of the twentieth century. His stories have an outstanding honesty and crafts­manship about them and reveal a deep knowledge of modern Ireland. O'Connor was a born story­teller, and he wrote with a refreshing directness and lack of pretension. As a short-story writer, he declared himself a follower of the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov, who, more than anyone else, turned writers away from the neatly plotted, "well-made" story and created the modern short story. O'Connor once wrote that the short story "is the nearest thing one can get to the quality of a pure lyric poem. It doesn't deal with problems; it doesn't have any solutions to offer; it just states the human condition."

Frank O'Connor was the pseudonym adopted by Michael O'Donovan, who was born and grew up in Cork, Ireland. His childhood was the classic child­hood of the underprivileged Irish at the turn of the century: the father a laborer, the mother going out to work as a cleaning woman, the child's future darkened by the difficulty of getting an education and by the narrowness of a life in which money is a perpetual problem. Michael O'Donovan did, how­ever, receive an elementary education from the Christian Brothers and contrived by voracious reading to extend that education. Between odd jobs, he managed to make a start as a writer. After spending a year in jail for his political support of the Irish Republican cause, he became a librarian in Cork and in Dublin. He taught at Northwestern University and at Harvard. Most American readers came to know him from his many stories that appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Even while he lived in the United States, he continued to write about Ireland. "I prefer to write about Ireland and the Irish people," he said, "merely because I know to a syllable how everything in Ireland can be said." In addition to his plays and poetry, he published critical studies of the short story and the novel and several collec­tions of verse.

Lecture 15

The Contemporary Age

Plan:

1. Philip Larkin

2. Seamus Heaney

3. Sylvia Plath

Philip Larkin

(1922-1985)

Life and Works

An uneventful life Philip Larkin was born in Coventry into a middle-class family and educated at Oxford. He led an uneventful life as a librarian, never married and died aged sixty-three.

Literary career and recognition His first collection of poetry, The North Ship (1945), was heavily influenced by Yeats. It was not well-received and so Larkin turned to fiction. He wrote two novels of which only the second one, A Girl in Winter (1947), received favourable reviews. A new collection of poems was rejected for publication in 1950, but some of the poems it contained, like Toads, appeared in various magazines. Larkin's next volume, The Less Deceived, appeared in 1955 and finally established his reputation as a major poet. Almost ten years later he published The Whitsun Weddings, which was again widely acclaimed, and Larkin was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. His last volume, High Windows, appeared in 1974.

A recluse and a pessimist Throughout his life Larkin had a negative opinion of himself and the world around him. When referred to as 'a great poet' he replied 'If I seem good it's because everyone else is so bad'. He was often accused of being a misanthropist who did not like meeting new people, children, travelling abroad or giving interviews.

Settings and subjects In his poems Larkin writes of ordinary life in an urban middle-class environment. His settings and subjects are places and actions with which the reader can readily

identify.

Themes A recurring theme in his poetry is unfulfilled ambitions. Reality falls cruelly short of expectation and this produces disappointment, an awareness of the futility of life and, ultimately, onhappiness. A mood of disillusionment, defeat, pessimism and boredom pervades his work. There is no divine influence, good or evil, in Larkin's world, no religion to comfort man. Flashes of ironic, often dark humour are the only source of relief in his grim universe.

Structure Many of Larkin's poems follow a similar pattern. They present simple, easy-going initial and middle parts, while the final stanzas are often dedicated to deep reflection and philosophical questioning. His language tends to be argumentative and philosophical rather than symbolic or

metaphoric.

The Movement Larkin is often associated with The Movement: the name given by critics to a group of 1950s poets who rejected the neo-Romanticism of Dylan Thomas's poetry and the experimentation and obscure symbolism of Modernists such as T.S. Eliot.

Reputation Larkin's talent lies in his ability to make the commonplace details of ordinary life the basis of thought-provoking poetry. He is also widely admired for his technical virtuosity with words and rhythms.