17 pages • 34 minutes read

The Explosion

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1974

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

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. Without simplifying their lives into cartoons or cheapening their emotions with snarky irony, Larkin, using Hardy as his literary template, created sympathetic poetry grounded in the world all about him.

Historical Context

“The Explosion,” written in the early 1970s, could not have been written a generation earlier. Although British coal mining existed for centuries, Larkin’s poem would not have been possible save for the advent of television. In fact, this poem is less about mining and more about watching television. After all, Larkin, born and raised in Coventry, had no first-hand knowledge of the mining culture of northern and western England. He never worked in a mine, nor did his family. Indeed, by the time Larkin drafted the poem, the mining industry in England was largely defunct. Larkin, by his own admission, had never been near a coal mine, nor did he, as a university educated librarian by profession, have any authentic ties to Britain’s working-class world of the mining regions, nor knowledge of the dangerous work of mining.

What triggered “The Explosion” was a BBC documentary on the history of coal mining, titled Coal Mining in Britain, that Larkin watched on his television when it aired in 1969. For all the authentic touches of the poem, the poem is a great leap in the imagination, as if a poet would write about Vietnam or the civil rights movement or landing on the moon only after watching news footage. The poem testifies to the powerful impact of image technology and how television created a kind of novel empathy that radio or newspapers never did. Despite the second-hand nature of the experience, which might undercut the poem’s legitimacy for some, Larkin reveals the powerful impact that images have on the grasping imagination and how, in turn, television created an immersive, interactive, and self-sustaining global community.