Lyric Poetry as Self-Possession: Philip Larkin

JOHN REIBETANZ Lyric Poetry as Self-Possession: Philip Larkin The Less Deceived was Philip Larkin's first major collection of poems. Published in 1955, it was immediately identified with the aims and values of 'the Movement'; indeed, Edward Lucie-Smith has described its arrival as 'the signal for the Movement to begin.'1 Like the term 'Movement' itself, Lucie-Smith's tone here suggests a programmatic precision more characteristic of military manoeuvres than of literary events. These connotations suit the poetics as well as the often combative dialectics of the Movement, for they emphasize the importance of conscious, directed effort in a world where fact rather than fiction is supreme. Writing is to be regarded as hard work, not as possession or obsession, and the goal is 'a poetry of urbane and momentous statement.12 The formulator ofthis goal, Donald Davie, has looked back on the Movement and recognized that 'what we all shared ... was a hatred for writing considered as selfexpression .'} The Movement thus fostered a creative approach that paralleled the new critical tendency to play down or even ignore the shaping presence of the poet's personality in the poem. As Movement historian Blake Morrison has observed, Philip Larkin's statements frequently defend and develop principles central to the Movement programme - principles of 'rationalism, realism, empiricism.' A random sample of Larkin's critical remarks easily yields support for all three. 'Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are'; and accordingly 'I write about experiences, often quite simple, everyday experiences ... and I write poems about them to preserve them.' Or: 'A writer's only "necessary engagement" is with his subject-matter.'4 This straightforward approach was carried out in The Less Deceived, as the volume's first readers saw it. F.W. Bateson spoke for them when he judged Larkin's poems'exceptionally well written' works that were 'like Pope's, uncomplicated by intruding symbols or suggestions from the unconscious mind.' Their most attractive quality seemed to be a 'coolness' which was especiallywelcome after the uncontrolled emotional crises and sentimental outpours of some of the late 1940S writers.5 Larkin appeared to have followed the clear voice of reason and achieved an essentially public poetry, the sunny pleasure dome minus the caves of ice. We might turn to the last two lines of one ofLarkin's poems, 'Whatever Happened?' for a summaryimpression ofwhat seemed to have happenedinhis poetry: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1985 266 JOHN REIBETANZ 'Curses? The dark? Struggling? Where's the source / Of those yarns now (except in nightmares, of course)?,6 Ofcourse, the difference between Larkin and his first readers looms out from between those parentheses. The poet acknowledges the complication of the 'intruding symbol' from the unconscious by giving the nightmare the last word in the poem1\ and by viewing it as 'the source' of his disquieting narrative. The physical location of 'whatever happened' may be 'Kodak-distant,' but the hypermetrical agitation of the last line emphasizes that we carry the true source of the tremors around with us; and the deliberate awkwardness of this hasty concession renews the feeling of disturbance, as the line's round brackets become the two halves of a suitcase too stuffed with the inexplicable to achieve a tight, resounding closure. This ending provides a beginning for the reinterpretation of The Less Deceived. All the more striking in a sonnet like 'Whatever Happened,' the conclusion embodies Larkin's recognition that 'experience makes literature look insignificant beside life'; the recognition underwrites similar endings of other poems in the volume, and it conveys more of Romantic frustration than ofAugustancontentment.7 Also squarelyin the Romantic tradition - and at odds with Movement assumptions - is Larkin's recent assessment ofhis motives for writing poetry: 'I've neverhad "ideas" about poetry; to me it's always been a personal, almost physical release or solution to a complex pressure of needs.'s It is time to view The Less Deceived from this perspective, to bring the poet back into his poems. I want to explore some of the needs which they attempted to meet, and to examine the way they work as solutions to those needs. Specifically, I...