Sigggggh, I love Philip Larkin...

Radically non-dualistic religioso in embracing dubious dichotomies non-shockah!

We are here to mourn the death of our friend Philip Larkin. He was the most private of men, one who found the universe a bleak and hostile place and recognized very clearly the disagreeable realities of human life, above all the dreadful effects of time on all we have and are. The world of his fellow creatures was hardly less forbidding: privacy was to be jealously guarded. In the sense of complete physical solitude, he found it a daily necessity. He saw people as hopelessly cut off from each other, and revealingly misquoted Donne in declaring, Every man is an island. And yet it was impossible to meet him without being aware in the first few seconds of his impeccable attentive courtesy: grave, but at the same time sunlit, always ready to respond to a gleam of humor or warmth. He was surprised if anyone found him a gloomy person: I like to think of myself as quite funny, he told an interviewer, and he was more than funny about those in the literary and academic world whom he considered fraudulent, and he found no shortage of those; and to hear him sounding off about a politician or any other public figure who was not to his taste did the heart good. But there was no malice in it, no venom. If he regarded the world severely or astringently, it was a jovial astringency. He could be at his funniest when uttering those same painful truths about life as those he made so devastating in his poetry. And it was all from the heart: he never showed off, never laid claim to feeling what he didn't feel, and it was that honesty, more total in his case than in any other I've known, that gave his poetry such power. He meant every word of it; and so, though he may not have written many poems, he wrote none that were false or unnecessary. His honesty extended to himself; again, nobody was ever more totally or acutely aware of his limitations. He took life seriously, he took poetry seriously, but not himself -- nobody who said he looked like a bald salmon could do that. No solemnity about himself as a poet either; when he'd written a poem he felt pleased, as if he'd laid an egg. But we take seriously what he has left us. We are lucky enough to have known him; thousands who didn't, and more thousands in the future, will be able to share those poems with us. They offer comfort, and not cold comfort either. They are not dismal or pessimistic, but invigorating; they know that for all its shortcomings life must be got on with. And now we must get on with ours, a little better equipped to do so with the help of those fragments of poignancy and humor in everyday things, those moments of illumination and beauty we should never have seen or known but for Philip.
Kingsley Amis December 1985

John Updike reviews Larkin in the new New Yorker

i love philip larkin. surprised this thread isn't longer. i bought his collected poems recently after reading martin amis talking about him in the ft (article sadly no longer online)

i read it daily and i find myself staring at some of the couplets and thinking them through, it really washes over you, so devastating but the trivial details give his poems a sort of beauty.

love this one in particular, "the life with a hole in it".

When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you've always done what you want,
You always get your own way
--A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that's been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I've never done what I don't.

So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod
(Six kids, and the wife in pod,
And her parents coming to stay)...

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.

are there other poets i should read if i like larkin? i mean i know he's massively canonical but beyond knowing famous names etc i am a bit of a noob with poetry, i have a frank o'hara anthology and now this larkin book and that's it.

Louis MacNeice? Has that practical engagment with the unpoetic mundane that I think Larkin has

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Fidning pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting (Wolves)

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Opens its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures. (Sunday Morning)

RS Thomas - has the unromanticising of the romantic pastoral that's in Larkin:

There was a sound of voices on the air,
But where, where? It was only the glib stream talking
Softly to itself. And once when he was walking
Along a lane in spring he was deceived
By a shrill whistle coming through the leaves:
Wait a minute, wait a minute - four swift notes;
He turned, and it was nothing, only a thrush
In the thorn bushes easing its throat.
He swore at himself for paying heed,
The poor hill farmer, so often again
Stopping, staring, listening, in vain,
His ear betrayed by the heart's need.

surprised this thread isn't longer.

some idiot started another one is why

Philip Larkin - "What will survive of us is love" or "Books are a load of crap"?

ah shit maybe i should have used that one.

i love this one, even tho it's totally "society is in the gutter". it's more the beauty with which he delivers that view, and the quiet way it's done. plus in terms of literally the space and the earth there's a truth there.

I thought it would last my time -
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there'd be false alarms

In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.

greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now,

is a really beautiful line imo

are there other poets i should read if i like larkin?

MacNeice and Thomas are good shouts I think. Ted Hughes, despite the early critical blah about him being the opposite of Larkin, shares a lot of themes, especially early on, and since sometimes they're writing about the same landscape or the same history comparisons are interesting. Auden and Spender have got Larkin-ish voices sometimes, or rather Larkin probly has Auden and Spender-esque voices sometimes. Yeats was a big early influence on the dude, tho Yeats has a big sprawling ouevre to pick thru.

Larkin was totally "sociey is in the gutter" but in a sad way that's as much about his sense of himself as it is the wider world; i'm with him on it, tbh.

Seconding Ted Hughes. I suppose you already know Seamus Heaney?

Fell completely in love with Hughes' poetry last year. It's so minimal and evocative, pastoral even.

i love Hughes a lot, as much as Larkin i think, but Hughes' Collected Poems is a lot harder to carry around with you :(

Read Hardy too.

i never liked heaney that much at school, but it is possible we did really boring heaney poems.

must try some of these recommendations, having an amazon binge...i like the fact larkin's poetry is quite modern and urban, think i get switched off by more i dunno, ethereal stuff.

most of the guys listed here have urban modes...Hughes has a mythological side to him that's still quite concrete and earthy but he does brilliant realist observation of rural life too

But yet there is beauty narcotic and deciduous
In the vast organism grown out of us:
On all the traffic islands stand white globes like moons,
The city’s haze is clouded amber that purrs and croons,
And tilting by the noble curve bus after tall bus comes
With an osculation of yellow light, with a glory like chrysanthemums.

― MacNeice, "Eclogue For Christmas"

as teenagers we dropped acid and walked the deserted 4AM dublin suburbs full of wonders like these, traffic lights an art show, the occasional nitelink bombing down the coast road impossibly. he was from belfast i think.

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
― MacNeice, "Bagpipe Music"

this couplet is one of a few hundred things that i suspect are always on repeat somewhere down deep in the subconscious somewhere. something abt the rhythm, and the sentiment.

Ordinary people are peculiar too:
Watch the vagrant in their eyes
Who sneaks away while they are talking with you
Into some black wood behind the skull,
Following un-, or other, realities,
Fishing for shadows in a pool.

But sometimes the vagrant comes the other way
Out of their eyes and into yours
Having mistaken you perhaps for yesterday
Or for tomorrow night, a wood in which
He may pick up among the pine-needles and burrs
The lost purse, the dropped stitch.

Vagrancy however is forbidden; ordinary men
Soon come back to normal, look you straight
In the eyes as if to say 'It will not happen again',
Put up a barrage of common sense to baulk
Intimacy but by mistake interpolate
Swear-words like roses in their talk.

― MacNeice, "Conversation"

basically

Early Simon Armitage has the urban thing, the clarity, plain man manner of address, not much of the gloom.

Douglas Dunn maybe? A bit too Larkin in places, but worth reading.

was just thinking about Dunn, the Larkin that likes human beings

all this looking great...

i also have a totally unrelated question...a friend of mine sent me a poem about a year ago that was sort of a love poem where the author said something like people should have to pay for the words they spoke, or be silent, this sort of whimisical but romantic poem. ring any bells? i can't find it at all.

so i have been reading macneice a lot...some really amazing stuff. the autumn journal excerpts in the selected poems are incredible. anyone read the whole thing? the section iv about the woman is one of the most amazing expressions of love i've ever read.

i also love this one, Woods.

"My father who found the English landscape tame
Had hardly in his life walked in a wood,
Too old when first he met one; Malory’s knights,
Keats’s nymphs or the Midsummer Night’s Dream
Could never arras the room, where he spelled out True and Good
With their interleaving of half-truths and not-quites.

While for me from the age of ten the socketed wooden gate
Into a Dorset planting, into a dark
But gentle ambush, was an alluring eye;
Within was a kingdom free from time and sky,
Caterpillar webs on the forehead, danger under the feet,
And the mind adrift in a floating and rustling ark

Packed with birds and ghosts, two of every race,
Trills of love from the picture-book—-Oh might I never land
But here, grown six foot tall, find me also a love
Also out of the picture-book; whose hand
Would be soft as the webs of the wood and on her face
The wood-pigeon’s voice would shaft a chrism from above.

So in a grassy ride a rain-filled hoof-mark coined
By a finger of sun from the mint of Long Ago
Was the last of Lancelot’s glitter. Make-believe dies hard;
That the rider passed here lately and is a man we know
Is still untrue, the gate to Legend remains unbarred,
The grown-up hates to divorce what the child joined.

Thus from a city when my father would frame
Escape, he thought, as I do, of bog or rock
But I have also this other, this English, choice
Into what yet is foreign; whatever its name
Each wood is the mystery and the recurring shock
Of its dark coolness is a foreign voice.

Yet in using the word tame my father was maybe right,
These woods are not the Forest; each is moored
To a village somewhere near. If not of to-day
They are not like the wilds of Mayo, they are assured
Of their place by men; reprieved from the neolithic night
By gamekeepers or by Herrick’s girls at play.

And always we walk out again. The patch
Of sky at the end of the path grows and discloses
An ordered open air long ruled by dyke and fence,
With geese whose form and gait proclaim their consequence,
Pargetted outposts, windows browed with thatch,
And cow pats - and inconsequent wild roses.”

don't suppose anyone has a copy or recording of "love and death in hull", the documentary from a few years back? can't find it online anywhere...

i had it on VHS but i think it's gone. i'll ask mrs V when i see her next.

amazingly i was gonna open this thread up myself this morning, to quote one of his cruder opening gambits.

practically dived into larkin book after coming back from a funeral in Ireland a week or two ago. gonna pick up douglas dunn's "elegies" today, not sure why I am massively keen on reading a book about someone's grieving for their dead young wife but that's one for the counselling session.

Love again: wanking at ten past three
(Surely he's taken her home by now?),
The bedroom hot as a bakery,
The drink gone dead, without showing how
To meet tomorrow, and afterwards,
And the usual pain, like dysentery.

that only feels tangentially apt but today it's bouncing round my head

Love Again comes back a good bit, unbidden, even when not relevant. More in a "Words at once true and kind,/Or not untrue and not unkind." space at the mo.

going to drop this here, never seen it, mean to watch later.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTdDS05x6d0

"it is intensely sad" is my line at the moment.

Love Again is immediately and permanently memorable. Perhaps because persistently applicable in one or more of its elements, and its total effect.

Anyone looked into the new exhaustively/exhaustingly complete volume of his poems?

Philip Larkin is a very good illustration of the difference between loving an artist and loving that artist's work. For all I know, Catullus was a snark and a tosser and you couldn't trust him not to steal the silverware.

Oh I don't know, I quite like his mournful, sardonic humour. Also the early letters between him and Kingsley Amis are fantastically exuberant and hilarious. Accept he was also selfish and in some respects perhaps unpleasant, as he did - but wdn't want to be the sort of person who held people rigidly to account in those areas as for the most part that would make me an unctuous hypocrite, other than in extreme cases. Accept also that this unpleasantness also extended to some extremely unwholesome political beliefs, but happy to sift the good from the bad here.

I mean, I agree in principle wrt artists, but don't find Larkin as a person that off-putting - wd've liked to have had a drink with him.

yeah i suspect that even his arch-Toryism was at a reasonably superficial level. the vulnerability and humour stamped so hard into the poetry convince me that he wd have been a man you'd enjoy a drink and a conversation with.

That Monitor thing is good by the way, although you can see Larkin thinking, well I can't remember the exact judgment on Betjeman (who he liked), but it specifically referred to his tv persona and was something like 'silly old fart'. He felt rather foolish about the posing with books and stuff as well, iirc. Noticed that one of the gravestones bears the name J Dixon, which is a mildly diverting coincidence, given the intertwining of Larkin and Amis' early lives.

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/18/34/2183466_9b9111af.jpg

wiki says this statue is "life size" but if so Larkin was huge, I swear it's nearly a foot taller than me.

also it kind of looks more like Gandhi

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Anyone looked into the new exhaustively/exhaustingly complete volume of his poems?

Nah, I'll get round to it, I'm sure , but I'm not that excited really – been reading him a bit lately, so I'm not sure why. I suppose I've never been that much of a fan of the unpublished bits and juvenilia - like Bishop, a very good self-editor and self-selector. Don't need the notes, tend to find big faber collecteds a bit bulky for carrying and reading, etc.

otoh who am i kidding, i'm buying it next payday.

Feels like he's properly out of his post-death rep slump, that's good.

i keep looking at the book in Waterstone's window but i've got the Collected, i'm not a big fan of the juvenilia and what the fuck's gonna be in the new one other than more of that and a couple of unearthed personal poems to his lovers? and yeah the new hardback'll be uncarryable - i'm still contemplating buying individual Ted Hughes volumes because the Collected is an unwieldy breeze block on my bookshelf

I've done that a bit - my Hughes collected just doesn't move, easier to take Crow out & feels better to read anyway. And I still pick up the old slightly cramped Macneice collected more than the handsome new one.

768pp! I hadn't quite realised. No, that's not moving in with me.

what pisses me off with the Hughes as well is that you've got childhood poems but they still arbitrarly left out the stories from Wodwo, dicks.

this one fucking slays me, it's just his colloquial gutting of himself that's so direct and disarming.

About twenty years ago
Two girls came in where I worked -
A bosomy English rose
And her friend in specs I could talk to.
Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and I doubt
If ever one had like hers:
But it was the friend I took out,

And in seven years after that
Wrote over four hundred letters,
Gave a ten-guinea ring
I got back in the end, and met
At numerous cathedral cities
Unknown to the clergy. I believe
I met beautiful twice. She was trying
Both times (so I thought) not to laugh.

Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn
And easily bored to love.
Well, useful to get that learnt,
In my wallet are still two snaps,
Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.

I suppose I've never been that much of a fan of the unpublished bits and juvenilia - like Bishop, a very good self-editor and self-selector.

yeah, i don't really go for that THIS INCLUDES EVERYTHING type of volume. Zachary Leader's biog of Amis was similar - you really are going to include everything you can aren't you? select! don't worry! you can represent significant characteristics with single anecdotes. we'll get it. feel it's a feature of some modern (US?) scholarship. Often seems yoked to c- insight. As if EVERYTHING destroys emphasis and proportion.

i'm happy that stuff is available...but yes a writer is formed by what they choose not to publish ffs

I finish rereading THE LESS DECEIVED.

I think I can see why the book is, certainly was, significant; why Larkin earned his reputation; though I have a feeling that THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS is even better (and a bit longer). I think the poems can hold a certain brittleness, partly because they are almost always saying something, making a case. Larkin seems to have written himself into that mode - in which to write a poem was to make a statement or assess an argument - and not very often moved out of it. I suppose it means that in reading the poem you have to assess the argument (which is not really the same as assessing a poem), and you might feel that he is rigging up a case just for the sake of it, to make a poem. To read him consecutively taking so many positions (in poetic form) can be wearying, or makes me feel that he himself must be wearied by it.

A thing that many many other poets, especially later, have done - just recording an impression, without offering a strong view on it - does not so much seem to have occurred to Larkin as a viable mode.

Perhaps I am seeking to say that the poems are rhetorical, and that rhetoric can be suspect, especially when applied so intensively (that is, in a sequence of highly charged pieces of rhetoric called poems, read in quick succession).

To return to my feelings above: I still feel that glibness hovers around some of those that feel more familiar. The pay-off of something like 'I Remember, I Remember' is another example. Yet it is also true that some of the poems are obscure to me, more than one might expect.

Thus 'Age':

My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud. I bend closer, discern
A lighted tenement scuttling with voices.
O you tall game I tired myself with joining!
Now I wade through you like knee-level weeds,

And they attend me, dear translucent bergs:
Silence and space. By now so much has flown
From the nest here of my head that I needs must turn
To know what prints I leave, whether of feet,
Or spoor of pads, or a bird’s adept splay.

I am not sure how much I understand that. 'O you tall game I tired myself with joining!' - Larkin must have known how perverse that line was, and been happy with it.

Larkin can enjoy delving into idiom, as in the list of trades in 'Toads', or this terrifically evocative, deliberately naive and vague stanza:

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines.
They seem to like it.

Fires in a bucket!

Yet even that poem ends somewhat enigmatically, for me:

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

What are the two things? I think one is the 'toad-like' quality in the speaker, and the other is work itself. The latter embodies the former. But what really is the former? Not very clear.

'Deceptions', whence largely comes the title, is notable, for one thing because Margaret Thatcher misquoted it interestingly when Larkin met her in the early 1980s; for another because it draws on a prior non-literary source; for another because it therefore seems to be thoroughly sympathetic to a (violated) woman. But then I don't really understand the line 'where / Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic', and I wonder if that part got Larkin back into the trouble the poem should have got him out of. I note also that the tone of the poem anticipates the Heaney of something like 'Punishment' in NORTH.

'Skin' is another example of a certain glibness: it's all too understandable. Whereas 'Absences' is strange, not that understandable. I genuinely don't necessarily know what it means:

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

It seems to me that these are the book's poles: a degree of communicativeness that can work so well that the poem is relatively quickly exhausted, and a degree of mystery that keeps the poems from that fate; with a middle ground.

That reminds me that to me the most powerful and painful poem in the book is 'No Road'.

i am rarely much of a champ when it comes to interpeting poetry but isn't "'O you tall game I tired myself with joining!" a memory of himself when small trying to keep up with the big children (where the line before and the line after it is him as a grown-up, first peering down at and then striding through the tinies)

Reluctant as I am to link to the Spectator, I am surprised we have come so far in the Larkin thread without discussing this article

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/this-be-the-curse-philip-larkins-big-problem

I am inclined to agree with Mark S's statement and find it perceptive.

I still think that the line retains a deliberate oddity, and still think the rest of the poem quite obscure.

mark s's read also seems right to me. enjoying this thread, Larkin's sort of measured gravity can thrill

in conclusion: in this two-stanza poem ('age') PL likens himself to sesame street's BIG BIRD

it opens with him surrounded by the grown up clouds of metaphysics (time! space!) but at its close he must pay attention to his own splayed feetprints on the far distant ground to make sense of himself

10/10 no notes, comments are closed

we shd start a thread where we interpret poems together, i think it wd be instructive (*sharpens trolling pencil*)

Larkin seems to have written himself into that mode - in which to write a poem was to make a statement or assess an argument - and not very often moved out of it. I

This is the thing with Wallace Stevens too.

we shd start a thread where we interpret poems together, i think it wd be instructive (*sharpens trolling pencil*)

So long as we do it I. A. Richards style

Mark: we did that, about 18 years ago, when poster Cozen was a notable ILB poster. Among other things (?) we had a rewarding long discussion of a particular poem that I liked by Sean O'Brien.

I don't especially see the comparison of Larkin to Stevens, as Larkin's 'ideas' or 'arguments' are usually quite straightforward or at least comprehensible - well, they are often this, though I admit that above I said that sometimes they were not - whereas I don't find those qualities in Stevens. To the point where I am not really sure that Stevens is making a case at all.

I have been reading very early Derek Walcott and he actually reminded me of Stevens, more than anyone.

Stevens can be abstruse but is often straightforward:

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Or:

Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.

Those may be good poems, but I don't understand what ideas they are advancing - in the particular way that Larkin (for good or ill) does.

I emphasise that I don't think poems 'should' put forward clear ideas; I just observe that Larkin sometimes does.

"We say God and the imagination are one" and "His self and the sun were one/And his poems, although makings of his self,/Were no less makings of the sun" are as straightforward as you can get!

I'll stop b/c we disagree.

take it to the poetry parsing thread!
a thread in which ilx interprets poems, sometimes line by line, and disagrees a lot (probably)

For me, Larkin is particular and personal and local: work is a toad squatting on my life. Parents are shit. Hull is other people. I can't get laid even in a sexy time. He has a grasp of details. He touches universal themes from time to time, but his feet were on the ground.

(I love Larkin BTW)

Stevens is an ontological writer concerned with the universe and with Berkelian perception: masts against a seascape create an order (if a perceiving being contemplates them). A jar shapes a landscape and ultimately a universe (if a perceiving being contemplates it). A frozen dessert, while you contemplate it, is an empire. A stupid bird becomes a whole fucking universe, while you are contemplating it. Any observed detail, to Stevens, can be a springboard into the universal. He touches reality from time to time, but his head was in the clouds.

(I love Stevens BTW)

Can't imagine a world without both

being pretty familiar with what's left of much of the region Larkin writes about i see recognisable details dropped in even when the poem itself is predominantly making the kind of arguments Pinefox describes

otm, Puffin.

I do wonder about Larkin's endings though, and how these lift him free of the accusation of groundedness (I know it's not an accusation really, but I think Larkin has become 'Larkinised' - kind of a subject of his own poem, frozen in time and space like the lovers in An Arundel Tomb - in a way Stevens hasn't and will never be).

I think 'The Whitsun Weddings' is as good an example as any:

We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

It's pointedly ambiguous, certainly, psychedelic even, and perhaps a deliberate attempt at unmooring from a perceived anchoring in the local and the particular. 'High Windows' makes the same move.

Perhaps these are the exception that prove the rule.

Stevens is less of a presence in his poetry; even his grand "we"s are the pronouns of a medium.

I agree, your Lordship. I get the feeling that Wallace Stevens (the person) would have regarded "Wallace Stevens" (the poet) as a character, as a mouthpiece for a particular epistemological viewpoint that was more or less sincerely held by Wallace Stevens (the person).

To Chinasky's point I don't think Phillip Larkin (the person) would have minded being conflated with "Phillip Larkin" (the poet). And I don't think of ~relative~ groundedness as being a bad thing. Being more "down to earth" than an airy spirit like Stevens is not exactly a criticism.

I may have missed something because am not really clear on why this comparison is being made - like, why are we comparing Larkin to Stevens instead of to Dylan Thomas or Sylvia Plath or Randall Jarrell or Audre Lorde or for that matter Adrienne Rich?

Because ILB poster Alfred, Lord S., above, stated that Stevens was like Larkin in writing poems that made statements and arguments.

No other reason.

Chinaski: I don't think Larkin's 'rise to transcendence' moments are the exception at all -- they're a standard feature of his work. I think that most full descriptions of what Larkin does would include this as a major weapon in his armoury, or option in his repertoire, or temptation to which he yields. I think he does it very well, but also that it might risk being routinised by its frequency.

Sure, isn't High Windows pretty much a textbook study in contrasts? Awkward cycle clips, religion, awkward cycle clips, transcendence, seriousness, death.

No one would remember it if it were just about bicycling and pants

That's a different poem. 'Church Going'.

'High Windows' is from about 20 years later.

Oh duh, sorry, serves me right for posting from work and away from the shelf

I will slink away into ignominy now

High Windows is about kids fucking

It is also name-checked by Jonatha Brooke on the uber-literary album by the Story, The Angel in the House, 1994ish

I finished THE NORTH SHIP, Larkin's 1945 collection. It would be fair to say: if you think you know Larkin (as most people do), but haven't read these poems (as some people haven't), then there is an aspect of Larkin you don't know.

A couple of years ago I read the Collected Poems of Larkin. Its a much more approachable volume than the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which I also have. For one thing the poems tend to be short, and the obscure moments generally surrounded by relatable anecdotes from daily life. Also the generally dour and wistful mood carries you through - even if you don't understand everything you feel like you understand the feeling.

since this thread was bumped recently i got a copy (collected poems) and have been enjoying it immensely.

Arrivals, Departures

This town has docks where channel boats come sidling;
Tame water lanes, tall sheds, the traveller sees
(His bag of samples knocking at his knees),
And hears, still under slackened engines gliding,
His advent blurted to the morning shore.

And we, barely recalled from sleep there, sense
Arrivals lowing in a doleful distance –
Horny dilemmas at the gate once more.
Come and choose wrong, they cry, come and choose wrong;
And so we rise. At night again they sound,

Calling the traveller now, the outward bound:
O not for long, they cry, I not for long –
And we are nudged from comfort, never knowing
How safely we may disregard their blowing,
Or if, this night, happiness too is going.

The first stanza's last line.

"Horny dilemmas" as a bashful allusion to sexual frustration seems typical.