Philip Larkin = a genius?

[limey123]

I know I'm not the only one here who appreciates a bit of Larkin's poetry (I've not read his two novels or much of his other prose). I studied the first volume of his mature poetry called "The Less Deceived" for A-Level over 30 years ago and it has stayed with me ever since. Since then I've regularly dipped into "The Whitsun Weddings" and "High Windows".

I feel he really wrote poetry for the "common man" (or woman), especially, in my view, if you have SA. His poems are often deceptively simple, yet he packs so much meaning into such little space. I've been listening to The Less Deceived plus "The Sunday Sessions" (a mix of his poems, including some of his less-interesting juvenilia) which are audio recordings of Larkin himself reading his poems (available for download from Amazon UK) and it really brings them to life. For example, one I barely knew but which I've been enjoying hearing recently is called "The Explosion". I personally feel he was a genius, the way he treated such themes as time, death, loss, shattered desires and aspirations, illusion vs reality, sex, feelings of the common man, and so on, so artfully and in ways most of us can relate to. Two of my faves, among many, are "Dockery and Son" and "Mr Bleaney", both of which treat the theme of what could be expected of us in life and what we have actually achieved. I think his very best poem might be "At Grass", it's so beautiful and is again packed with hidden meaning.

I've recently been buying up just about every decent-looking book of crit on Larkin I can get my hands on (surprisingly, for such a popular poet, there isn't all that much). I know he is reputed to have had some views which would be controversial or seem dated today, but he was also a man of his environment/class and of his times. The main thing is to appreciate the art of the poetry.

Here are my favourite quotes by Larkin:

I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself

Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

[limey123]

*Sorry, mods, this was supposed to go into The Lounge, please redirect it, thanks!

[Scurrilous Rumour]

Love a bit of Larkin. His poems tend to stick in the memory. Particular favourites are Toads, Toads Revisited and Aubade, but lines from many of his poems float into my mind from time to time.

He was however, as you mention, not the nicest of men. Apart from his controversial views, his treatment of the women in his life always makes me recoil a bit. (He juggled two long term lovers, neither of whom he would commit to, whilst having an affair with his secretary at work.) He seemed to have been a fundamentally selfish person. My attitude to him is one of loving the art but disliking the artist. I don't have a problem making that distinction.

[limey123]

^ You're right, Scurrilous, he could be a cheesedick, especially (but not only) regarding the women in his life. Interestingly, this book has very recently appeared:

https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Monica-Jo...733259&sr=8-21

[Your Mum]

I don't read books (they're a load of crap), but I picked up a well-thumbed second-hand copy of Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 recently and it's really good, actually.

I like Larkin's poems. They bring you up, your mum and dad...

[biscuits]

I'm recently rediscovering my love for poetry.

Not a fan of Larkin, I have to say though! He was a bigot.

[Moksha]

Have you read Clive James on Larkin? He considered Larkin the second best English language poet of the 20th-century, above even Yeats. That's quite a compliment, especially from James, who knew his stuff.

I love him. Of course, it depends what you value/look for in art. Personally, I'm a bit of aesthete, in that I value beauty above all else (w*nkerish though that sounds). Others are more interested in content; they want artists to shake things up – to shock and challenge the mainstream ('epater les bourgeois', etc). Or they are interested in ideas and want the artist to make some profound statement about life.

You get none of that from Larkin. In his own insular, sneering way, he was himself an aesthete. He had no interest in ideas, and wasn't an intellectual. He also made little effort to play around with form. What he loves is language. A poem like Here, for example, isn't really about anything. I haven't read it for a while, but I can still remember the "shining gull-marked mud," or something like that. I love Monet and Vermeer for the same reason – their paintings aren't really about anything. They are just beautiful.

If I had to rank the English-language poets (I mean for the sheer beauty of their language), I would go:

1) T. S. Eliot
2) Larkin
3) Shelley
4) Tennyson

Keats, Wordsworth, Owen, Graves and Yeats have never really done it for me. I love some of their stuff, but they don't quite hit the spot. I quite like Swinburne as well. Also Walter de la Mere. His poem The Scarecrow is one of the most perfect, beautiful things I have ever read.

Unfortunately, no one seems interested in art anymore. Harold Bloom was spot on about that. Instead of judging a poem or play or novel purely on aesthetic grounds (i.e how good it is), we judge it based on the race, gender and political views of the author. People should be careful. Take a close look at an author's private life and almost everyone deserves to be 'cancelled' (jesus, how Orwellian that word is!).

Thinking about it, I'd describe Larkin as the last great English poet. I mean the last poet to strongly identify with the canon of English poets that began with Chaucer (followed by Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Houseman, Owen, Sassoon, Auden, etc). American poets have now pretty much taken over.

[biscuits]

Originally Posted by biscuits

I'm recently rediscovering my love for poetry.

Not a fan of Larkin, I have to say though! He was a bigot.

^ Just to clarify. I'm not a fan of his poems. And he was a bigot. Two separate thoughts.

[Scurrilous Rumour]

Originally Posted by Moksha

Have you read Clive James on Larkin?

Somewhere Becoming Rain, right? I've read about half of it, which is a bit of an embarrassing admission for such a short book, but I tend to pick up and drop books quite randomly. It was good from what I remember. I've always wondered though why James picked that particular quote as the title of his book. I vaguely remember some documentary on YouTube that mentioned Larkin wasn't totally happy with the line when he was writing the poem and it was surrounded by multiple crossings out in his notebook. I suppose the quote sounds very Larkinesque, but still ...

If I had to choose a title it might have been 'What Will Survive Of Us'.

Or maybe 'The Shit In The Shuttered Chateau'? No, that would just be wrong, lol.

[limey123]

Originally Posted by Moksha

Have you read Clive James on Larkin? He considered Larkin the second best English language poet of the 20th-century, above even Yeats. That's quite a compliment, especially from James, who knew his stuff.

I love him. Of course, it depends what you value/look for in art. Personally, I'm a bit of aesthete, in that I value beauty above all else (w*nkerish though that sounds). Others are more interested in content; they want artists to shake things up – to shock and challenge the mainstream ('epater les bourgeois', etc). Or they are interested in ideas and want the artist to make some profound statement about life.

You get none of that from Larkin. In his own insular, sneering way, he was himself an aesthete. He had no interest in ideas, and wasn't an intellectual. He also made little effort to play around with form. What he loves is language. A poem like Here, for example, isn't really about anything. I haven't read it for a while, but I can still remember the "shining gull-marked mud," or something like that. I love Monet and Vermeer for the same reason – their paintings aren't really about anything. They are just beautiful.

If I had to rank the English-language poets (I mean for the sheer beauty of their language), I would go:

1) T. S. Eliot
2) Larkin
3) Shelley
4) Tennyson

Keats, Wordsworth, Owen, Graves and Yeats have never really done it for me. I love some of their stuff, but they don't quite hit the spot. I quite like Swinburne as well. Also Walter de la Mere. His poem The Scarecrow is one of the most perfect, beautiful things I have ever read.

Unfortunately, no one seems interested in art anymore. Harold Bloom was spot on about that. Instead of judging a poem or play or novel purely on aesthetic grounds (i.e how good it is), we judge it based on the race, gender and political views of the author. People should be careful. Take a close look at an author's private life and almost everyone deserves to be 'cancelled' (jesus, how Orwellian that word is!).

Thinking about it, I'd describe Larkin as the last great English poet. I mean the last poet to strongly identify with the canon of English poets that began with Chaucer (followed by Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Houseman, Owen, Sassoon, Auden, etc). American poets have now pretty much taken over.

Thanks for your interesting thoughts, Moksha. I was hoping you'd comment on this thread. I do have the Clive James book, just haven't got round to reading it yet. I like Larkin's idea that art is mainly about preservation of something. Not sure I agree with you that Larkin had no interest in ideas, several dominant themes run through his mature output, but I totally agree about his powerful use of language, he loved words.

I had to read some Wordsworth during my studies and I thought it was pretty rubbish. Owen wrote some powerful poetry but my impression is, as with Sassoon, he was strong on the war poetry but less memorable on other topics. Donne is challenging but has written perhaps some of the finest verse in the language. There is a fine collection by Penguin called The Metaphysical Poets which has much Donne, Marvell, and the other usual suspects. I'll have to check out The Scarecrow, thanks for the tip. Of Eliot, I know The Waste Land well (or used to, having done it in-depth for A-Level). I haven't read anything else by him. While I admire what I have read of Eliot, he seems to delight in showing off his learning (compare with Larkin's anti-intellectual approach and of professing ignorance in some areas). I agree with you that much in the way of reviews these days seem to have a political slant or agenda to them. You have your marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, and other critical approaches. I appreciate far more the old school practical criticism which examined the text based on its internal merits (somehow, though, I got a good English degree while being pretty lousy at prac crit myself, lol).

You mention the canon of English poets begins with Chaucer. While largely true, there are a number of known and unknown Middle English poets apart from him, and I would put forward my own view which is that some of the finest and most beautiful poetry in our language is anonymous and has survived from the Old English period. One truly wonders how much we have lost...

[Dougella]

Originally Posted by Moksha

Have you read Clive James on Larkin? He considered Larkin the second best English language poet of the 20th-century, above even Yeats. That's quite a compliment, especially from James, who knew his stuff.

I love him. Of course, it depends what you value/look for in art. Personally, I'm a bit of aesthete, in that I value beauty above all else (w*nkerish though that sounds). Others are more interested in content; they want artists to shake things up – to shock and challenge the mainstream ('epater les bourgeois', etc). Or they are interested in ideas and want the artist to make some profound statement about life.

You get none of that from Larkin. In his own insular, sneering way, he was himself an aesthete. He had no interest in ideas, and wasn't an intellectual. He also made little effort to play around with form. What he loves is language. A poem like Here, for example, isn't really about anything. I haven't read it for a while, but I can still remember the "shining gull-marked mud," or something like that. I love Monet and Vermeer for the same reason – their paintings aren't really about anything. They are just beautiful.

If I had to rank the English-language poets (I mean for the sheer beauty of their language), I would go:

1) T. S. Eliot
2) Larkin
3) Shelley
4) Tennyson

Keats, Wordsworth, Owen, Graves and Yeats have never really done it for me. I love some of their stuff, but they don't quite hit the spot. I quite like Swinburne as well. Also Walter de la Mere. His poem The Scarecrow is one of the most perfect, beautiful things I have ever read.

Unfortunately, no one seems interested in art anymore. Harold Bloom was spot on about that. Instead of judging a poem or play or novel purely on aesthetic grounds (i.e how good it is), we judge it based on the race, gender and political views of the author. People should be careful. Take a close look at an author's private life and almost everyone deserves to be 'cancelled' (jesus, how Orwellian that word is!).

Thinking about it, I'd describe Larkin as the last great English poet. I mean the last poet to strongly identify with the canon of English poets that began with Chaucer (followed by Shakespeare, Donne, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Houseman, Owen, Sassoon, Auden, etc). American poets have now pretty much taken over.

Not to start a different debate but I just have to disagree with your second to last paragraph there. Art isn't judged by the race, gender or political views of it's author (although often that can affect the content of their work ofcourse) we've just seen more of an effort in recent times to make sure that work of writers from different backgrounds is seen an celebrated. Which just means there more variety for us all to enjoy as far as I'm concerned!

[Moksha]

Originally Posted by limey123

Not sure I agree with you that Larkin had no interest in ideas, several dominant themes run through his mature output, but I totally agree about his powerful use of language, he loved words.

Well, he was uninterested compared to most. If you compare him to the other major British poets of his day, you'll see what I mean.

First of all, Larkin had little interest in politics (something I don't regret, as I have little interest myself). Compared to someone like Auden he's detached and remote.

But it isn't just politics. Larkin had very little intellectual curiosity. He was bright – very bright – but anti-intellectual (you can be clever without being intellectual). Ted Hughes, for example, was very interested in myth, Jung, the unconscious, Shamanism, the Bardic history of Britain and Ireland, and so on. He even thought of himself as a 20th-century Shaman. Larkin would have snorted in contempt at all that. Or take Robert Graves, who immersed himself in Greek myth, and then developed his theory about the 'white goddess' and the pre-historic roots of poetry (which he hoped to revive). Geoffrey Hill (who I've never read) was also heavily intellectual. Then there are people like Yeats and Eliot. Yeats went to seances, believed in a 'spiritus mundi', in reincarnation and disembodied spirits, etc. Eliot, on the other hand, immersed himself in philosophy, Buddhism, Christian mysticism, the writings of Henri Bergson. Larkin had no time for that sort of thing. You can certainly identify common themes. But there is no intellectual framework, no underlying philosophy or system out of which his poetry emerges. It's a shame really. I kind of wish he'd embraced Buddhism, or Paganism, or something. The emptiness and sadness can be hard to take.

Donne is challenging but has written perhaps some of the finest verse in the language. There is a fine collection by Penguin called The Metaphysical Poets which has much Donne, Marvell, and the other usual suspects.

A new book has just been published on Donne and has received glowing reviews – pretty much fives stars across the board.

Of Eliot, I know The Waste Land well (or used to, having done it in-depth for A-Level). I haven't read anything else by him.

Some would say that his four quartets are the greatest poems of the 20th-century. The Wasteland seemed like the most beautiful thing in the whole world when I first read it. Now, 20 years later, I feel pretty much the same.

I agree with you that much in the way of reviews these days seem to have a political slant or agenda to them. You have your marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, and other critical approaches.

I couldn't bear to sit in a university seminar today, certainly not with a young professor. Even when I was at university in the 1990s, very little attention was paid to the beauty of a poem or novel. And no effort was made to teach the students to appreciate that beauty. I just wish the Marxists would **** off to the politics department, and the deconstructionists to the philosophy department, and leave literature to the people who love literature. These attacks on the canon send me insane with rage. Literature/the canon is more important than religion. It's the very best that the human race has written and thought. Unfortunately, we now have a situation in which sneering, left-wing academics are exaggerating the quality of novels and poems just because of who wrote them. Harold Bloom, for example, got in trouble for pointing out that Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou are actually second rate (Ralph Ellison is the great African American writer). At the same time, a genius like Kipling is downgraded not because he was a bad writer but because he supported colonialism.

You mention the canon of English poets begins with Chaucer. While largely true, there are a number of known and unknown Middle English poets apart from him, and I would put forward my own view which is that some of the finest and most beautiful poetry in our language is anonymous and has survived from the Old English period. One truly wonders how much we have lost

Very true. I always think it's kind of sad that we place so little value on this country's literary heritage. It's the one thing we should celebrate and be proud of. I take no pride in the royal family (quite the opposite), and I'm not much of a fan of Churchill or any other political or military hero. But I AM proud to be from the island that produced Shakespeare and Dickens and Jane Austen (not to mention Darwin and Newton). And I don't see that as exclusionist at all. I wish more immigrants would claim that heritage for themselves. If you are born and raised here, it is part of you – part of your landscape and culture.

[Dougella]

^ Why do you consider Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison second rate? And what about The Brontë sisters, George Elliot, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning?

[limey123]

Originally Posted by Moksha

I couldn't bear to sit in a university seminar today, certainly not with a young professor. Even when I was at university in the 1990s, very little attention was paid to the beauty of a poem or novel. And no effort was made to teach the students to appreciate that beauty.

Yes, I experienced much the same already in the early 1990s. My A-level teachers did a much better job at trying to teach students to appreciate the beauty of literature than my uni professors, many of whom who had some political or similar agenda in mind.
Only one professor at uni (during my post-grad studies) inspired me as much as my A-Level English teachers did. I wish all teachers/tutors were so inspiring as they were. You could tell they really loved teaching, whereas many uni lecturers I suspect don't and just do it because they have to.

[firemonkey]

I'm not into poetry very much, but like these.

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

John Clare

Dulce et Decorum Est
By Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.