“'In this century English poetry,' [Philip] Larkin maintained, 'went off on a loop-line that took it away from the general reader.' He offers several 'reasons.' The first, 'the aberration of modernism, that blighted all the arts,' simply begs the question; the second, 'the emergence of English literature as an academic subject, and the consequent demand for a kind of poetry that needed elucidation' reflects his own rejection of modernism and his antipathy for academic criticism." Francis-Noël Thomas • Humanities

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