This study investigates Philip Larkin’s poetry (1945-1977) as a site of “vernacular mourning” for British imperial decline, challenging conventional readings that tend to view Larkin’s work as merely domestic or parochial. Drawing primarily on Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia, this research reveals how Larkin encodes responses to decolonization through accessible language, traditional forms, strategic absences, and domestic displacement. While empire rarely appears explicitly in Larkin’s work, its spectral presence haunts his poetry through what Jacques Derrida has termed “hauntology.” The analysis demonstrates how Larkin’s poetic strategies create collective spaces for processing imperial loss without directly confronting it, operating through what Jan Assmann identifies as the transformation from communicative to cultural memory. His preference for traditional English forms functions as cultural reassertion during national decline, while strategic silences reveal Britain’s pathological inability to mourn imperial loss. Key poems including “Church Going,” “The Whitsun Weddings,” “Here,” “High Windows,” and “Going, Going” transform personal experiences into metaphors for national transformation, displacing imperial anxiety onto religious decline, failed renewal, geographical peripheralization, and environmental degradation. This research reveals how Larkin’s seemingly apolitical poetry mediates Britain’s most significant twentieth-century historical transition, creating vernacular spaces for collective mourning through encoded, rather than explicit, engagement with historical trauma.
Karimiard, S. and Nazari, H. (2025). Unspoken Elegies: Vernacular Mourning for the British Empire in Philip Larkin’s Poetry. Research in Contemporary World Literature, (), -. doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.400901.2715
MLA
Karimiard, S. , and Nazari, H. . "Unspoken Elegies: Vernacular Mourning for the British Empire in Philip Larkin’s Poetry", Research in Contemporary World Literature, , , 2025, -. doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.400901.2715
HARVARD
Karimiard, S., Nazari, H. (2025). 'Unspoken Elegies: Vernacular Mourning for the British Empire in Philip Larkin’s Poetry', Research in Contemporary World Literature, (), pp. -. doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.400901.2715
CHICAGO
S. Karimiard and H. Nazari, "Unspoken Elegies: Vernacular Mourning for the British Empire in Philip Larkin’s Poetry," Research in Contemporary World Literature, (2025): -, doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.400901.2715
VANCOUVER
Karimiard, S., Nazari, H. Unspoken Elegies: Vernacular Mourning for the British Empire in Philip Larkin’s Poetry. Research in Contemporary World Literature, 2025; (): -. doi: 10.22059/jor.2025.400901.2715
)