Is the poet Philip Larkin a modernist?

As a poet, Philip Larkin has often been seen as an
anti-modernist -- that is, as a poet who consciously rejected many
of the most influential poetic trends of the first half of the twentieth century. If one
associates modernism with poets such as Ezra Pound (or even the more often more
accessible T. S. Eliot), then Larkin is not a modernist as they were. He did admire the
writings of W. H. Auden, but that is partly because Auden himself wrote in a style much
less "difficult," much less arcane, than the style associated with the Pound of the
later Cantos or than the style of Eliot in The Waste
Land.

Consider, for example, the closing lines
of The Waste Land:

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Datta. Dayadhvam.
Damyata.

Shantih    shantih  
shantih

These are the kinds
of highly allusive, highly puzzling lines (at least to a typical reader) that one can
never imagine Larking writing. In fact, Larkin deliberately and quite vocally turned his
back on much of the more obscure, overly intellectual, formally unconventional writings
of the modernist poets who preceded him.

Larkin is not an
intentionally "sophisticated" or anti-bourgeois writer, as Pound or Wallace Stevens
often are, nor he is a given to extreme formal experimentation in the ways that, say, E.
E. Cummings or William Carlos Williams are.  Instead, Larkins' poetry seems generally
traditional in form and highly accessible in phrasing. He admired earlier English poets
such as Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owen, and in fact England and the English are two of
his favorite topics. In that sense, again, he represents a turn away from the highly
self-conscious internationalism of many "modernist"
poets.

Here, for example, are the opening lines of one of
Larkin's best poems, "Aubade":

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I work all day, and get half-drunk at
night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I
stare.

Here, likewise, are
the opening two lines of another important Larkin poem, "Dockery and Son":

'Dockery was
junior to you,
Wasn't he?' said the Dean. 'His son's here
now.'

Larkins' poems seem
simple in phrasing (although, of course, upon examination they prove far more complex
than they initially appear). Larkin deliberately tried to write in a style that would
make poetry relevant again to the majority of "common" readers.  As a member of the
so-called "Movement," he was part of an intentional rejection of many of the perceived
excesses of literary modernism. He much more admired the writings of John Betjeman than
those of Ezra Pound. He represents, in that sense, a return to the grand tradition of
poetry in English, a tradition often rejected by the
modernists