Appreciation …

… John Robert Lee on Philip Larkin’s “Church Going”. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Larkin and many of his literary contemporaries of the post world-war years, following the disappointments and loss of faith of the writers of the twenties and thirties, reflected their own agnosticisms in a plain verse, a new formalism that was vehicle for their own loss of belief in religion and political ideologies. “Church Going” (and the bulk of Larkin’s work) certainly spoke for and to their generation with influence and a certain irrefutable logic.