Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley

Focusing on the significance of place, connection and relationship in three poets who are seldom considered in conjunction, Rory Waterman argues that Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley are representative of an emotionally grounded but self-conscious trend away from modernism in late twentieth-century poetry. While they do so in vastly different ways, all three poets epitomize many of the emotional and societal shifts and mores of their age. Waterman looks at the foundations underpinning their poetry and the attempts of all three to forge a sense of belonging with or separateness from their readers; the poets' varying responses to their geographical and cultural origins; the belonging and estrangement that inheres in relationships, including marriage; the forced estrangements of war; the antagonism between social belonging and a need for isolation; and, finally, the charged issues of faith and mortality in an increasingly secularized world. While his book is inevitably shaped by the poets' biographies, Waterman avoids the tendency towards obfuscation that can attend too great a biographical focus. In bringing together poets who represent three separate threads of a net that carries much of twentieth-century British thought and feeling, Waterman charts a composite poetic 'life' from inherited environment to death and spiritual transcendence.