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  • Larkin Reconsidered
  • A. Banerjee (bio)

PHILIP Larkin’s considerable reputation as a poet suddenly plunged after the publication of Anthony Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). Motion declared that the poet who had been greatly admired as the writer of haunting poems of melancholy and sadness had, in fact, led a miserable existence. He went on to make the absurdly flamboyant claim that the “beautiful flowers of [Larkin’s] poetry” grew “on long stalks out of pretty dismal ground.” What is more, Larkin was unmasked not only as an unpleasant personality who was false and deceptive among the people he had known but also as a prejudiced reactionary who was a misogynist and a xenophobe. In our age of political correctness and multicultural criticism, such exposure of his views inevitably damaged his poetic reputation. Critics started to discover traces of right-wing imperialism and misogyny in his poems as well. The general public and trendy professors alike no longer wanted to read or discuss the works written by such an unsavory character. D. J. Enright regretted this mistaken belief “that a bastard like that could [not] write perfectly shaped, plangent lyrics.” No one wondered, Enright went on to complain, “whether someone who wrote such poems could ever be such a bastard.” That might be an interesting line of inquiry, but it would lure critics away from what Larkin actually wrote into speculation about the relationship between his personal life and his writing. It is time that we return to his poems as works of art to reexamine their achievement, which of late has been unfortunately obscured.

Larkin’s first major publications were two novels published in quick succession. The second one, A Girl in Winter, was particularly well received. But he soon discovered that he could no longer write fiction. He regretted this because, as he said in his Paris Review interview, he “never wanted to ‘be a poet,’” but had “tried very hard to write a third novel for about five years. The ability to do so had just vanished.” This was disappointing for him because he felt that if he were a proper writer, in his terms, he [End Page 428] would have been a novelist rather than a poet: “Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.” In the absence of this choice he continued to write poems, apparently because of the call from the Muse: “I didn’t choose poetry, poetry chose me.”

The Muse made the right decision, though Larkin’s poetic beginnings were unpromising. The poems in his first volume, The North Ship (1945), were unremarkable, and they went mostly unnoticed. But one can see that he already had a clear idea about the kind of poetry he wanted to write. Unimpressed by the current poetic trends, he had little sympathy with the florid neoromantic poetry that was being published at the time, and he also distanced himself from such modernists as Eliot and Pound. Their preoccupation with the “common myth kitty” and their learned allusions and obscurity alienated Larkin. He accused modernists of making poetry forbiddingly academic and abstruse, thus frightening away the common reader. He himself had a simpler conception of poetry, which he thought was a matter of emotion, to which the ordinary reader could respond with pleasure. Fortunately his discovery at this time of “the little blue Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy” offered him an encouraging precedent. Hardy’s example showed that “one could simply relapse back into one’s own life and write from it. Hardy taught one to feel rather than to write—of course one has to use one’s own language and one’s own jargon and one’s own situations—and he taught one as well to have confidence in what one felt.” Larkin also liked what Hardy wrote about: “his subjects are men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love.” This precisely was Larkin’s own subject matter, and this similarity with Hardy gave him more confidence.

He once explained that a surge of inspiration seized him soon after he left...

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