Larkin's Sceptical Love: "Wild Oats" and "Talking in Bed"

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) is the most influential English poet of the second half of the twentieth century and the central figure of The Movement — a loose grouping of poets who, in the 1950s, reacted against the rhetorical excesses of 1940s Neo-Romanticism. Movement poetry valued clarity, restraint, irony, traditional forms, and an unflinching engagement with the disappointments of ordinary life. Larkin's love poems — if they can be called that — are studies in failure, self-deception, and the impossibility of living up to the ideals that love demands.

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Context (AO3)

The Movement

The Movement emerged in the early 1950s, associated with the anthology New Lines (1956), edited by Robert Conquest. Its key figures — Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie — shared a suspicion of grand gestures, emotional excess, and intellectual pretension. They wrote in traditional forms (rhyme, metre, stanza) and used the language of everyday speech rather than the heightened diction of Romanticism.