| Summary: | This essay focuses on Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived, a collection of poems published in 1955, and tries to demonstrate how the poems within it can be organized and understood according to a contrast between more and less deceived. Through close reading and comparative analysis this overarching contrast is shown to be expressed by recurrences of imagery and thematic material as well as by a series of related opposing terms which inform many of the viewpoints expressed within the collection. These oppositions include those between illusion and disillusion, distance and proximity, surface and depth, artifice and reality as well as innocence and guilt. The essay also concludes that the overarching categories of greater and lesser deception are expressed to varying degrees by the different poems and that neither category can thus be considered as favoured above the other.
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