Full Description
This book is a sequel to the recently-published book The Colours the Words Cast. Colour Terms in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas (2025). It takes over the methodology of that study and the results obtained in it, in order to compare colour usage in the work of Larkin with that already found for Thomas. Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) and Philip Larkin (1922-1985) are undoubtedly among the most important British poets of the 20th century. They belong to different, though adjacent, periods, while their aims in writing poetry and their attitudes towards it differ considerably. Both poets were reluctant to accept attempts to classify them in terms of specific poetic 'movements'. The authors investigate in detail the use of colour terms in the four main collections of Larkin's poems: The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. In particular, they link colour usage to the symbolic connotative associations of the colours and compare the results with those previously obtained for Thomas. In comparing the colour usage of the two poets they seek explanations for differences in their respective poetic aims, themes and language. Apart from providing information on Larkin's usage, the contrasts also throw more light on the findings for Thomas described in the previous study.
Contents
Chapter 1: Prologue: aims of the study and structure of the book.- Part I:Initial considerations.- Chapter 2: Aims, themes and language in the poetry of Philip Larkin.- Chapter 3: Aims, themes and language in the poetry of Dylan Thomas.- Chapter 4: The corpus of poems and tools for analysis.- Chapter 5: Hypotheses and their basis in a comparison of aims, themes and language in the two sets of poems.- Chapter 6: Frequencies of colour words in the two sets of poems.- Part II: Chromatic primary basic colour terms and related non-basic terms.- Chapter 7: Green and red.- Chapter 8: Blue and yellow.- Part III: Achromatic primary basic colour terms and related non-basic terms.- Chapter 9: White.- Chapter 10: Black.- Part IV: Secondary basic colour terms and non-basic metonymic terms.- Chapter 11: Secondary basic colour terms and related non-basic terms: brown, grey and mauve.- Chapter 12: Non-basic metonymic colour terms related to metallic substances: gold(en), silver, pewter and bronze.- Part V: Some further findings.- Chapter 13: Some further aspects of colour term usage.- Chapter 14: Comparison of symbolic associations of colours in Larkin and Thomas.- Chapter 15: Metaphorical and literal uses of colour terms in the poems of Larkin and Thomas.- Chapter 16: Epilogue.
