The Explosion

As with many promising young poets of post-World War II Britain, Larkin studied and sought to reflect the impact and influence of two towering figures in early 20th-century English-language poetry: the Irish spiritualist William Butler Yeats and the erudite American-born cultural philosopher T. S. Eliot. It was only when Larkin was in his late twenties that he rediscovered the fin-de-siecle poetry of Thomas Hardy. Like most British schoolboys, Larkin had read Hardy but had promptly dismissed Hardy after college as too accessible, too popular. As he acknowledged later in rediscovering Hardy, Larkin rescued his poetry from the esoteric mysticism of Yeats and from the deliberate obscurantism of Eliot, overinvolved poetry that as his study of Hardy revealed inevitably alienated poetry, making Modernist poetry itself precious and narrow in its impact, unread and unreadable.

Hardy’s influence is seen in “The Explosion.” Larkin creates with immediacy and without patronizing it, the working-class world of the miners heading off to work. He captures the uncomplicated joyful bond of the miners as well as the profound grief of their bereaved families. In this, “The Explosion” reflects, with Hardy-esque sincerity, the joys and sorrows, the agonies and the ironies of real-time people. Hardy showed Larkin that the poet need not reach back to the myths of Antiquity nor develop complex mystical systems to create poetry that matters to people.