This Be The Verse

Assessment Objective Four

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overview of Assessment Objective Four defining context- identifying contextual influences- exemplar contextual influences i. social and historical context exemplar ii. biographical context exemplar iii. literary context exemplar making contextual links writing about contextual links

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overview

Assessment Objective Four

AO4 tests your ability to use contextual information to improve your interpretation and analysis. There are four main types of context that can influence the meaning or interpretation of a text.

Context overview:

i. Social and historical: important events, cultural attitudes

ii. Biographical: the personal life of the writer

iii. Literary: the artistic influences at work during the period

iv. Wider reading: meaning in relation to other relevant texts

defining context

What do we mean by context?

In both the exam and coursework elements of your course you are awarded marks for how well you use your understanding of the following contextual factors to improve your reading of the texts.

i. Social and historical – considers the impact of important people, public events and cultural ideas, attitudes and beliefs on a text

ii. Biographical – looks at the significance of the writer’s personal life, including the family, relationships and events that shape a text

iii. Literary - focuses on the importance of the artistic milieu that the writer operates within and how this might shape style and meaning

iv. Wider Reading – some units require a text to be considered in relation to other texts, either by the same writer, genre or theme

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This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.    They may not mean to, but they do.   They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats,   Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

Activity one: read the contextual information about Philip Larkin and see if you relate anything you read to poem below.

identifying contextual influences

This Be the Verse (1971)

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.    They may not mean to, but they do.   They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats,   Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

exemplar contextual influences

Literary: New Movement style: anti-romantic with strict metre and rhyme natural speech rhythm and not pompous or elevated language

Social and historical: trace of the Angry young man: disaffection with established order WW1 and WW2 failure of previous generations and elite classes

Biographical: parent’s unhappy marriage, which caused Larkin difficulties string of relationships with women, but no children

Wider Reading: the way the speaker of ‘Mr Bleaney’ becomes like the previous occupantsadness and loneliness in what should site of passion ‘Talking in Bed’

i. social and historical context exemplar

Social and historical:

trace of the Angry young man: disaffection with established order

WW1 and WW2 failure of previous generations and elite classes

In ‘This Be The Verse’ Larkin critiques the way each generation passes on its flaw to the next. In the first stanza he explains how ‘your mum and dad’ ‘fuck you up’, filling you with their ‘faults’ before adding ‘some extra, just for you’. However in the second verse he makes it clear that these mothers and fathers were themselves ‘fucked up’ by their parents, who he describes as ‘fools in old style hats and coats’. In his resentment of his elders there is a trace of the Angry Young Man figure, writers like Larkin who were dissatisfied with the established order in the early 1950s. Similarly, the reference to ‘old-style hats and coats’ is an allusion to the earlier generation of parents, whose leaders were largely responsible for the death and destruction during World War One. Larkin sees the same mistakes repeated by different generations over time.

ii. biographical context exemplar

Biographical:

horror of parent’s unhappy marriage, causing Larkin difficulties

Larkin had a string of relationships with women, but no children

In ‘This Be The Verse’ Larkin critiques the way in which each generation passes on its flaws to the next. In the first stanza he explains how ‘your mum and dad’ ‘fuck you up’, filling you with their ‘faults’ before adding ‘some extra, just for you’. However, in the second verse he makes it clear that these mothers and fathers were themselves ‘fucked up’ by their parents, who he describes as ‘fools in old style hats and coats’. In his resentment towards his parents there is clear sense of the horror he felt towards his own mother and father, Eva and Sydney. Larkin hated the arguments his parents had and their often unhappy marriage has been considered as one of the main reasons why Larkin himself found it difficult to sustain long-term relationships. Despite a string of affairs with different women, Larkin never got married or had any children.

iii. literary context exemplar

Literary:

New Movement style: anti-romantic with strict metre and rhyme

natural speech rhythm and not pompous or elevated language

In ‘This Be The Verse’ Larkin critiques the way each generation passes on its flaws to the next. In the first stanza he explains how ‘your mum and dad’ ‘fuck you up’, filling you with their ‘faults’ before adding ‘some extra, just for you’. However, in the second verse he makes it clear that these mothers and fathers were themselves ‘fucked up’ by their parents, who he describes as ‘fools in old style hats and coats’. Despite being written in 1971, the style of the poem is very much in keeping with the New Movement writers, a group Larkin is considered to have belonged to in the 1950s. The repeated use of profanity and colloquial references like ‘at one another’s throats’meet the unofficial intentions of the New Movement poets, which were to use anti-romantic language in natural speech rhythms that reflect the voice of the reader.

Context Influence on meaning or style of the poem

Social and historical

Biographical

Literary

Wider reading (other texts)

making contextual links

Activity two: use the contextual details and your notes on other Larkin poems to identify contextual links to ‘Talking in Bed’

Context Influence on meaning or style of the poem

Social and historical

widespread poverty and hardship; fractured society; changing individual / national identity before the sexual freedoms of late 1960s

Biographical overlapping relationships a sign of how Larkin used relationships to protect himself Larkin rarely took an interest in his sister’s life, which he thought (feared?) mundane

Literary Movement poems nostalgic for former Britain poems filled with pastoral images of decaying way of life as Britain becomes more urban

Wider reading (other texts)

loneliness of pitiful existence in ‘Bleaney’ nature of ‘synthetic’ lives shaped by artificial consumer desires in ‘Large Cool Store’

writing about contextual links

Activity three: use the completed table below for ‘Talking in Bed’ to write three paragraphs about the influence of context on the poem