Andrew Motion has claimed Larkin’s poems “…explore the gulf between deception and clear-sightedness, illusion and reality, and solitude and sociability…”
Larkin employs a range of linguistic and literary techniques to enhance continuing battle between illusion and reality, and in looking at “Sunny Prestatyn” and “Essential Beauty”, Larkin also focuses on his discontent with modernism.
The irony contained within the title “Essential Beauty” is that the beauty is an illusion, and underneath all the billboards that “block the ends of streets with giant loaves” there is a harsh reality, o
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