Six Poets: Philip Larkin

The qualities that distinguish the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) - accessibility both formal and syntactical, traditional meter and rhyme - practically guaranteed two things: popularity with a public, most of whom never liked poetry (or never read it), and a difficult relationship with literary critics and scholars, many of whom equate accessibility with a lack of discipline and rigor. The facility with which the average reader can enter a Larkin poem in no way makes it easy to maneuver within the poem and find everything of value there. It is precisely the kind of problem faced by Robert Frost and by those who find greatness in some of his poetry. Frost was long thought to be an unofficial Poet Laureate. Larkin was actually offered the post when John Betjeman died, but turned it down.

Most great poets restrict themselves to certain subjects that become their métier. With Larkin they were solitude and non-conformity (both as sources of sorrow and strength), life as ultimately disappointing, the unfair tradeoff of youth for wisdom, the inability to find fulfillment in women or in love. I think of "Reasons for Attendance":

The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative,
Draws me a moment to the lighted glass
To watch the dancers - all under twenty-five -
Shifting intently, face to flushed face,
Solemnly on the beat of happiness.

- Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat,
The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out here?
But then, why be in there? Sex, yes, but what
Is sex? Surely, to think the lion's share
Of happiness is found by couples' sheer

Inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned.
What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell
(Art, if you like) whose individual sound
Insists I too am individual.
It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well,

But not for me, nor I for them; and so
With happiness. Therefore I stay outside,
Believing this; and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.

30 December 1953


But Larkin occasionally tackled subjects that were otherwise outside his purview, like the long tour de force, "Show Saturday," "Faith Healing," or poems that are uncharacteristic of him, like "The Trees," "First Sight" the late poem "The Mower," or "An Arundel Tomb," with its most incongruous (for Larkin) last line, "What will survive of us is love." Really? Many another Larkin poem would beg to differ.

I think most would agree on what I think are his best poems, "Church Going," "The Whitsun Weddings," "Dockery and Son," "The Old Fools," and "Aubade."

Larkin simply wasn't difficult - or difficult enough - to impress the "new" critics who happened along in the Sixties just when he was hitting his stride. His problem was similar to Frost's, although Larkin didn't live long enough to become a parody of himself. As Randall Jarrell said of the late Frost collection, Steeple Bush: 

"Steeple Bush" is no book to convert intellectuals to Frost. Yet the ordinary "highbrow" reader is making a far greater mistake when he neglects Frost as commonplace, than the academic reader makes when he apotheosizes him, often on the basis of his most complacent or sentimental poems.

After Larkin's death, a one time friend, Andrew Motion, published a biography of Larkin that made his detractors hate him even more and gave them a completely unjustified sense of vindication: it turned out that Larkin was a frightful Tory, held racist and sexist views, and had a definite taste for bondage pornography. No wonder his poetry was liked by so many! 

What made matters worse was how succinctly and beautifully Larkin defended his own poetic practice:

"It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance; the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing. If the second stage has not been well done, the device will not deliver the goods, or will deliver only a few goods to a few people, or will stop delivering them after an absurdly short while. And if there is no third stage, no successful reading, the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all."

The most remarkable thing about Larkin today is that, though it has been 33 years since his death, and his Collected Poems has been compiled and published, new poems continue to be discovered and authenticated. One such, called "Unfinished Poem," was left in typescript at his death:

I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof
And lay on the bed there with my jacket off.
Seeds of light were sown on the failure of evening.
The dew came down. I lay in the quiet, smoking.

That was a way to live—newspaper for sheets,
A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts
From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!
That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!

For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind,
Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;
To keep out of his thought was my whole care,
Yet down among the sunlit courts, yes, he was there,

Taking his rents; yes, I had only to look
To see the shape of his head and the shine of his book,
And the creep of the world under his sparrow-trap sky,
To know how little slips his immortal memory.

So it was stale time then, day in, day out,
Blue fug in the room, nothing to do but wait
The start of his feet on the stair, that sad sound
Climbing to cut me from his restless mind

With a sign that the air should stick in my nose like bread,
The light swell up and turn black—so I shammed dead,
Still as a stuck pig, hoping he'd keep concerned
With boys who were making the fig when his back was turned;

And the sun and the stove and the mice and the gnawed paper
Made up the days and nights when I missed supper,
Paring my nails, looking over the farbelow street
Of tramways and bells. But one night I heard the feet.

Step after step they mounted with confidence.
Time shrank. They paused at the top. There was no defence.
I sprawled to my knees. Now they came straight at my door.
This, then, the famous eclipse? The crack in the floor

Widening for one long plunge? In a sharp trice,
The world, lifted and wrung, dipped with remorse.
The fact of breathing tightened into a shroud.
Light cringed. The door swung inwards. Over the threshold

Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,
Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised.
Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?
Why is he not here? What summer have you broken from?


I'm not sure why this was left unfinished or called "Unifinished Poem." It reads as a complete poetic statement. Perhaps Finis (The End) was intended?