William Sydney Graham (1918-1986) and Phillip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985) were two post-war British poets who, as they belonged to two different literary movements, had distinct creative influences. Graham is considered to be a neo-romantic poet as he concentrated on the relation between humanity and Nature and the feelings this parallel can help to express, though he also went further to include and discuss such themes as “the voyage of exploration and self-discovery,” (Lopez 2006 : 100). Graham’s poetry is described as shiver inducing by its mysterious nature (Pinter 1999). On the other hand, Larkin is said to follow the symbolist tradition, especially regarding metaphors (Hawkes 1994). The poet also has a reputation of ‘isolation, constriction, and detachment. His fear of death, his dark humor, and his ironic treatment of social and religious institutions are the hallmarks of his collected works,’ (French 1993: 85). Due to the similarities of the poets’ dark style, six specific poems were chosen, and six metaphorical expressions were extracted with the intention to find out what kind of concepts are used to create metaphors whose goal is to emotionally disturb the reader, i.e. those referring to death, failure or fear, and how they affect the poems […]
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