Sigggggh, I love Philip Larkin...

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'm not sure this sort of thing does anyone any favours:

the citation Burnett offers from a fellow critic who, warning against a too literal linking of the poet's life and the poet's poems, "correctly insists that 'An April Sunday Brings the Snow' does not specify the sex of the 'you' addressed, the relationship of the speaker to that person, or indeed details of skin colour and ethnicity"

Here's where I insert a plug for A Girl in Winter.

People leave their curatorial instincts on the shelf and want to include 'everything', true. Wonder if its a mania that's more prevalent due to internet expansion, e.g. "you can find everything through google", "all music is available now", etc.

it pre-dates that i think, ties in to the scholarly urge towards the huge biography and a certain section of Academe - i was wondering if a poem like "Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses" is hitting at a similar experience or attitude of Larkin himself.

xps

feel like these sort of editions come from a culture where seriousness or importance or just worth has been jumbled up with academic weight or solidity, ie it is important we have the materials that will allow us to produce serious, not-wrong essays on the topic of this writer, this is our tribute. Justifies expensive archive acquisitions for some libraries too I guess.

Am fond of the classic big library editions, but they've got a job to do & I don't feel like I need that kind of apparatus when i just want to read Church Going.

Does Larkin or Amis write about living-author archive acquisition somewhere? Maybe just a prfessional thing as a librarian. I half-remember it but can't check, have to go out.

'Posterity' too is sort of about this iirc - is that the Jake Balakowsky one?

yes, "Posterity" is the one i was really trying to remember

i connect this urge with the minute cataloguing of Joyceana and the use of old notebooks to "decode" Finnegans Wake etc

if i was A.S. Byatt i'd say it was an american thing probably cf. Possession

Philip Larkin is a very good illustration of the difference between loving an artist and loving that artist's work.

i have a hard time caring much about any of the 'revelations' about larkin being a dick in his diaries or letters or whatever, partly because i feel like that kind of private dickishness is nobody's business (if anything it seems to have distracted ppl from his actual work) and partly because i suspect most ppl would look pretty bad if you could peer into all of their private correspondance, diaries, etc.

oof. £40.

i might have a look at the apparatus next time i'm in waterstones. i think it's an interesting volume for faber to put out. the jacket design sort of signposts it's not quite how they normally operate.

i have more sympathy for the guy insisting on the lyric context than most of you do, i guess? but it's one of those things ... i don't know, anyone who feels it useful to approach larkin in that way doesn't really need the reminder, and he is about the least useful poet to approach in that way i can imagine. (i'm reading a lot about dickinson at the moment, and it's interesting how much that kind of reading made a helpful counterweight to, like, psychoanalytic studies that made her a hysteric and the poetry a symptom.) (but no one is rushing to make larkin anything other than he is, i guess.)

ha, the first google result for 'naturally the foundation ...' has a little critical note reminding you that all lyric poetry is to be understood as persona &c &c

that down cemetery road interview is a beautiful piece of tv.

Really enjoying Larkin's Oxford Book of 20th Century English Verse over the last few days. Never used to be able to get into it, but I think I had more ↖MODERNIST↗ hang ups when I last looked at it.

so the big new not-for-reading edition was just sitting in the library, waiting to be borrowed. Will report back.

prelim report: it is big; losing a fresh-page-for-each poem format makes it much less pleasant to read (but I guess the old collected isn't going out of print?); and I am taken aback by the 200-odd pages of uncollected stuff (as against 120pp 'published in the poet's lifetimes').

lifetime, not lifetimes. He only had one. And used it moderately well I suppose.

love and death in hull is on uktv torrent site thebox.bz. i think it's open sign up but if not i have invites, just give me a shout.

From the latest Private Eye:

He fucks you up, the Bard of Hull
He may not mean to, but he does
Combines his rapt, seductive lull
With bouts of misanthropic scuzz

But he was fucked up in his turn
By old-style poets he thought great
Bleak symbols of the funeral urn
Like crappy Auden and crappier Yeats

Man hands on influence to man
It deepens like a swelling ocean
So get out quickly while you can
And don't turn into Andrew Motion

I don't much like that, but then I don't much like parody or light verse, or anything really. But (idly) wondering– does anywhere still run those parody and light verse competitions that you read about in mid-century author biographies? They always seem to be entering the New Statesman poetry competition under a pseudonym (& losing to Gavin Ewart).

What happened to light verse? The slightly respectable sort, I mean. Answer may have to do with Half Man, Half Biscuit.

Whole K Amis essay iirc in his Book of Light Verse. (Auden's got one of these as well, right?) I can't remember what he said, I'll dig it out. Probably mentions the First World War. Half Man Half Biscuit a good answer imo. That pastoral touch, & lightly-dealt with tragic romance.

I think the K Amis essay is one of his reactionary ones btw. Not very appealing.

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.