Deprivation and Loss

Philip Larkin famously observes, "deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." In "One Art" Elizabeth Bishop writes, "the art of losing's not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster." Though these poets are so similar, Bishop is not mentioned in this huge book. They both lived far from the centers of literary power, published infrequently, and died in their sixties. Each published four volumes of verse, spaced ten years apart, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s. Their poetry—precise, delicate and sensitive, formal, restrained, and skeptical—was marked by subtle wit, sharp light, and clear detail. Both writers experienced miserable childhoods and both wrote about absence, disappointment, sadness, loss, wrong choices, and the unlived life. Devoured by the wolves of memory, they leavened their mournful themes with intelligence, humor, and technical skill.

Larkin made a great advance in style and content from his first book, The North Ship, to The Less Deceived; but there's a gnawing disenchantment in the much darker and drearier later volumes, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. An excellent judge of his own poetry, Larkin published only his best work: the residue is substandard. In his case less is more. Larkin's sharp-edged similes are memorable: "Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives"; "The trees are coming into leaf / Like something almost being said." His best lines are unforgettable: the morbid "Give me your arm, old toad; / Help me down Cemetery Road"; the resentful "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do"; the hyperbolic "Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me)— / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first lp"; and his brilliant version of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter": "In fact, may you be dull— / If that is what a skilled, / Vigilant, flexible, / Unemphasised, enthralled / Catching of happiness is called." One can't help noticing the contrast between Larkin's dazzling virtuosity and most current blobs of prose splayed on the page as if they were poetry.

This volume contains 83 pages from Larkin's four volumes, 226 pages of uncollected and unpublished poems, and 339 pages of illuminating commentary. Burnett explains the references and—quoting one of Larkin's often self-deprecating comments: "First verse all right, the rest crap"—summarizes the critical analyses without attempting interpretations of his own. Though the extensive commentary is meant to be definitive, Burnett does not explain many echoes and allusions: "drum taps": Walt Whitman (page 5); "The soundless river pouring from the cave": Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" (13); "Heaviest of flowers": Housman, "Loveliest of trees" (19); "the drunken boatswain": Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat (23); "Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses": influenced by Auden's satiric poem about itinerant lecturing, "On the Circuit" (52); "And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless" (80) echoes the celestial vastness in the first chapter of Forster's A Passage to India: "the distance between the vault and [the stars] is as nothing to the distance behind them, and that farther distance, though beyond colour, last freed itself from blue" (80); "His air-conditioned cell at Kennedy" refers to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, which also houses the Hemingway Collection, rather than to the obscure Kennedy University in Pleasant Hill, California (86); "You'll be 'truly great'": Spender, "I think continually of those who were truly great" (109); "the Mexique Bay": the title of Huxley's Mexican travel book as well as the place where Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping off a ship (293).

Burnett also doesn't mention that "I Remember, I Remember" is shaped by a series of negatives. And he doesn't note that Larkin writes, "If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water" (56), seeming to forget that Christianity uses water from baptismal sprinkling to total immersion...