Page "Brunette Coleman" Paragraph 25

Motion describes the Coleman poems as " a world of comfortless jealousies, breathless bike-rides and deathless crushes ", mixing elements from writers and poets such as Angela Brazil, Richmal Crompton, John Betjeman and W. H.

Auden.

Larkin's own attitude to these poems appears equivocal.

He expresses pleasure that his friend Bruce Montgomery liked them, especially " The School in August ".

However, to Amis he writes: " I think all wrong-thinking people ought to like them.

I used to write them whenever I'd seen any particularly ripe schoolgirl ...

Writing about grown women is less perverse and therefore less satisfying ".

Booth finds the poems the most impressive of all the Coleman works, in their evidence of Larkin's early ability to create striking and moving images from conventional school story clichés.

They are an early demonstration of Larkin's talent for finding depths in ordinariness, an ability that characterised many of his later poems.

Booth draws specific attention to the elegiac quality of the final lines of " The School in August ": " And even swimming groups can fade / Games mistresses turn grey ".

In Booth's view the Coleman poems are among the best Larkin wrote in the 1940s, well beyond anything in his first published selection The North Ship ( 1945 ).