Larkin’s voice is post-war British, library-dwelling, no-bullshit about the genteel lies. The profanity isn’t decoration—it’s class, period, and philosophical stance all at once. He can say “they fuck you up” because his cultural location authorizes that rupture of decorum.
Frost is New England soil, Puritan inheritance, the stoic who shows you the wall and lets you understand what it cost to build. His authority comes from being there—the farm, the woods, the specific regional experience made universal through image. He can’t assert “man hands on misery to man” because his contract with the reader demands earned wisdom through witnessed detail.
Voice isn’t style applied to content. It’s the ground the poem stands on—who speaks, from where, having seen what, authorized by which tradition and which rupture of tradition.
Larkin can deliver cosmic bleakness in twelve lines because his voice already is cosmically bleak British librarian. Frost needs the snow, the neighbor, the wall, the specific failure that implies the pattern. Different epistemologies: Larkin deduces from bitter clarity; Frost induces from accumulated particulars.
You can’t port the “dopamine” poem into successful verse without establishing who speaks and why we should listen. The fragmented lines and symbols try to generate authority through typography. But voice comes from location, history, presence—the thing itself, not the formatting of the announcement.
Sources:
- Philip Larkin, High Windows (1974)
- Robert Frost, North of Boston (1914)
- Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (1988)