Sigggggh, I love Philip Larkin...

"unbeatable slow machine" might be my most frequent entering-head-unbidden poetry phrase.

watch love & death in hull rece

what a downer

also memorised* this be the verse

*close enough

:) "This Be the Verse" is conveniently amenable to memorization

tho obv i'd be a hypocrite telling folks not to have any kids themselves

How did you get love and death in hull, cozen? I have found only long dead torrents.

my videotaped copy is long gone sadly

LG - you might like don paterson's first couple of collections? he's gotten a bit ~airy-er~ as time's got on but there's def echoes of larkin in the early stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqa6L22m0rY

excellent!

early paul farley channelling larkin to an extent also

I was thinking about trying to develop some thoughts about Geoffrey Hill's most recent lecture and his project in general but I don't know. More relevantly to the thread's nominal purpose, I sold my collected Larkin today.

I wish they'd kept up with mp3s of the lectures. I think only the first three or four went up

Peter Reading is like Larkin without the hatred of all things foreign.

i love Larkin and Reading, but I don't quite see that, or the gap in sensibility isn't really to do with foreignness. Not sure.

just to continue on the Hill lectures (& I would like to hear what you have to say thomp), I am also now remembering the bit where he lays into Sam Leith for no real reason that I can remember.

Mm. I was in Oxford for the last one and the guy I was staying with was going, so I thought I might as well; the last one I saw was last year when I was working on my master's, and I basically could barely follow it at all. This one seemed comparatively plain-speaking, though I asked my friend and the two other people to give me what they thought was the argument, at various points over the next 24 hours, and my friend was totally wrong and the other two just went 'yeah, no, I'd have no idea how to do that'.

yeah, after listening to the earlier ones I'd def have trouble precis-ing an argument - they're deliberately difficult, or roundabout. I remember thinking that I didn't understand quite how we'd got here when he'd be talking about Mandelstam, say, but then there'd be a moment of clarity, and I could see what i thought he was trying to do with the misdirecting and going backwards &c.

Mercian Hymns XXV

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.

The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust ---

not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.

love that

i love Larkin and Reading, but I don't quite see that, or the gap in sensibility isn't really to do with foreignness. Not sure.

Well, I wanted to say "all things foreign and intellectual", but it felt wrong even when I put "intellectual" in quotes and so I just gave up and tried for something comically reductive (and failed). Do you think it's wrong to suggest Reading as poet similar to Larkin? I think of both as English miserabilists, "laureates of decay" and so on, but I may be off on that as I'm not overly familiar with Reading's work. He's often too cryptic for me, to be honest, which is part of what I meant by foreignness: not just quotations in Spanish or whatever, but an entire aesthetic more in line with the kind of high modernism Larkin made a point of rejecting. Still, looking at some of Reading's early work just now, I did find plenty of Larkinesque moments. One poem in particular, "St James's", seems sort of apropos:

On Holy Thursday cycling in the Lakes
I found St James's on a pewter hill
and force of habit rather than desire
carried me on towards the wrought iron gates.

The dusty Dunlops and the worn out brakes
of my Rudge leaning on the lake-stone wall
seemed more akin to Larkin than to me.

Some stones inside the musty porch were Saxon,
and there, beside the patent-leather Eden
simmering round St James's in Lent sun,
the sexton, one spring day digging a grave,
in 1898 unearthed remains
that proved to be of Viking origin.

The latest stone, marked 1968,
shews that the process is still going on.
I, in my turn, turned the worn rusting latch,
saw the inevitable Norman arch
and, near the font, some notes by Reverend Twigge
about the church and its history —
he was the rector here in nineteen seven,
in his place now is Geoffrey Dennison Hill.

I climbed the old steps up the Western Tower
(added about 1248) and found
barrows of sticks from jackdaw generations,
piled in a stook beside the swaying bell
eggs and dry feathers and winged skeletons,
and I descended into the chancel,
observing, not from interest but a sense
of having to have a sense of history,
the aimless woodworms' doodles in the roof.

The empty Player's Weights pack in the font
belonged to Betjeman, I have no doubt,
and there was Larkin's shilling left in trust
as payment for the Reverend Twigge's epistle;

but I was not there, just a cardboard copy
guiltily going through the motions of
what all day-trippers do before they leave,
replacing bike clips, lingering at the door
giving the closing latch a final twist,
consulting Twigge one final time before
turning from font to underground stone kist.

I do see it, sort of - like Reading as Pound modernism injected into Larkin/Movement anti-modernism (which is sort of a variety of Eliotic conservative modernism, maybe), but I think they're farther apart than they look even in early Reading - too tricksy, too self-conscious, cunning interlocking poems, about Larkin-ness rather than Larkiny. Not denying there's overlap - things like vers de societe, Sunny Prestatyn in particular- but I think the lyric urge isn't quite there in Reading maybe? Or doesn't trust itself. Nice comparison tho', I'm interested in why I draw back from it.

how many different modernisms do you think you can identify

sincere question

I just make them up when I need them

I'm trying to answer this properly but i've been coerced into making a wordle for a powerpoint workshop presentation.

I'd use a few diff kinds when thinking about things - it's fairly fluid & they exist in relation to one another & overlap, so idk, Pound & Eliot would go together in a different discussion. & it definitely reflects what I look at more closely, ie English Poetry, mostly - so, slightly ridiculously, the art/anti-art manifestoing movements of the early c20th are bundled in my head.

So if I just said 'Modernism', I'd mean primarily a big Joyce/Eliot/Pound category; that'd break into a make-it-new style - fractures fragments collages textuality etc etc etc - and then maybe a kind that retreats from that into classicism, that's more the Eliot end of things (& I'd take that line down to Hill).

vs that in my head is a more obviously late-Romantic modernism that's Yeats etc - looks like anti-modernism in places, & drifts towards meeting the Eliot tributary of hard modernism.

Then there are British subsets where the coordinates get more complicated for me - an establishment/bloomsbury variety, then the 30s poets sitting in a funny place where they're in an Eliot camp but still seem to have a dose of Georgian coming through, those nature/grail types in the novel like Mary Butts… categories sort of break down but that's what I'd expect them to do when you look at individuals, they become ways of finding interesting or useful questions.

I should really read that Alexandra Harris book on Romantic Moderns, but I am just a bit sus that she all Bloomsbury, John Piper, marvellous, whereas I think that is backing down from THE PROJECT

Larkin's an odd one because he does seem properly, thoroughly committed to anti-intellectual + pure british trads, but bits of otherness do keep breaking through.

back to wordle

i recently read kevin jackson's constellation of genius, which is a kind of diaryish rundown of 1922, the year in modernism. it's not a theoretical or analytical book at all, but it does give a sense of the SPEED of modernism, and the many different currents (historical-cultural) feeding into it. jackson def favours eliot and (esp) pound as central to it all - and yeah, woolf in particular comes across as a horrible (social) snob about joyce - tho the centerpiece of the book is prob a dinner attended by proust, joyce, picasso and stravinsky. book also brought home to me just how right-wing/reactionary a lot of the modernists were - so there's another connection to larkin etc

"A man who knew so little inner peace should be forgiven anything" -- agree or disagree?

(Asking as a general critical principle, not just w/r/t Larkin. Strikes me as poete maudite received-wisdom bollocks, but I am in the midst of a v.charged personal struggle to emerge from romantic equation of suffering with artistic insight, so maybe projecting

)

I was briefly tempted by that Jackson book - it's a great topic - but I don't really trust him, feel like everything I've read by him has been a bit underpowered intellectually - chimes with what your saying, I suspect.

agree or disagree?

The word "anything" should only be admitted in that statement if it carries a sense so attenuated as to render it useless.

okay well obviously it's hyperbolic, but I'm more curious about the idea that an author's 'private' missteps (odious political views, racism, misogyny, whatever) can be redeemed(? canceled out??) by the author's equally private "self-hatred" and suffering. something about this moral calculus feels off to me, but I can't put my finger on it.

... basically it seems to boil down to "Larkin may have been a shitty person, but he was aware of it, and managed to balance being a shitty person with making non-shitty art; therefore, he can be excused for not using his self-knowledge to become a less shitty person"

(NB I know next-to-nothing about Philip Larkin outside of what's in this thread. I enjoy most poems of his that I've read, and find nothing objectionable in them.)

Good essay by James Fenton:
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/fenton_su13.html

It is very strange that a poet whose key work lies in three rather short volumes should have caused such difficulties for his editors and such controversy among his readers. But the readers pay him the tribute of a sort of possessiveness and concern: they want their poet to look his best. And it’s hard for a poet to look good in his Collected Poems, if by “collected” we mean anything like “complete.” Most poets’ collected works will include things that would make the author cringe. Presented in untidied form, such gatherings remind me of nothing so much as those yard sales characteristic of recession America, in which families set out on their front lawns the contents of their closets and dens—the Frisbees, the old scooters, the clothes neither wanted nor needed, the dreadful joke presents—all in the hope of raising a little cash.

Here

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river's slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires--
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers--

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iJPUPy50Gxc/TTGujk5h1TI/AAAAAAAAAww/4WEwGmfagwY/s1600/Wilberforce-House.jpg

the slave museum

turns out I'm a fan

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thus shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff 5
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font. 10
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant. 15
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, done an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this, 20
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases, 25
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some 30
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone? 35
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew 40
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he by my representative, 45

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth, 50
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutered frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is, 55
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious, 60
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

I start rereading THE LESS DECEIVED (1955).

My feeling thus far is:

a) slight over-familiarity of the very familiar ones, which can then - being what they are, poems that say things and convey thoughts or arguments - feel glib. 'Reasons for Attendance' and '... Photograph Album' here. And I find myself looking at lines and wondering what they really mean, eg: why would photographs be 'smaller and clearer as the years go by'? Photographs do not, in fact, do that. So why are they figuratively doing that?

b) with the less familiar ones, a very different feeling - of surprise, uncertainty, mystery. 'Wedding-Wind' is, I suppose, a pastiche, partly Yeatsian (but perhaps supposed to be English not Irish) but still contains some of that mystery, in a line like: 'Can it be borne, this bodying-forth by wind / Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread / Carrying beads? Shall I be let to sleep / Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?' 'Dry-Point' is even more mysterious to me: I literally don't know what it's about. (And Larkin is supposed to be all too obvious and conversational.) 'Coming', serious about hope, is matched by 'Going', serious about death.

More generally the obsession with death is already somewhat too heavy for me (he was only 33), and doesn't give the poems weight and power in the same way that his interest in the actual difficult sensations of life does.

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.