Great Poets of the Twentieth Century: No. 4 - Philip Larkin

There's a curious paradox about Philip Larkin. He's probably the most widely admired and accomplished English poet since Auden (with only Ted Hughes coming close), yet most comments on him start with some sort of defensiveness or apology. Take Andrew Motion's introduction here: despite a positive first paragraph, he goes on to say that:

...his reputation underwent a spectacular revision. The loveable Eeyore was really a porn-loving misogynist whose view on race, women, the Labour party, children, mainland Europe (and most of the rest of the world) were repugnant to any fair-minded liberal person.

It says something about the literary classes that disliking a political party which has lost more elections than it's won is seen as controversial. But that aside, it frustrates me that people are so awkward about Larkin.

Yes, he's got his limitations as a writer (his limited range of subjects, his repetitive use of images, the constricted emotional range of his work) and clearly, he had flaws as an individual (it's interesting to track the strands of his personal failures through his work, though a bit like shooting fish). But, bluntly, so what? Given that he's written more, better, poetry than anyone from this country since the War, perhaps we should be asking fewer questions of him and more of all those who failed to match his achievements. Many were probably nicer and even ideologically more respectable (hell, they may even have preferred Kinnock to Thatcher). And yes, he was in many ways a bit of a shit. But he was a major poet (oh, ok: an important minor one). And it's surely preferable to read poetry by someone who's a bad man but a good poet, than a good man and a bad poet (to simplify hugely). The complication with Larkin is that the sources of his human failures were so closely tied to both his successes and ultimate failures as a poet. But looking through this selection, what successes they were.

The poem XX from The North Ship hints at how close Larkin got to being a truly terrible sub-Yeatsian poet. Likewise, in Vers de Societe, the stuff where 'the gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed' warns of a mooning nonsense which is a far more terminal vice in a poet than Thatcherism. And yet the slangy punch and insight of his late poems here (High Windows and This Be The Verse in particular) shows how far from his murky juvenilia he got.

Dockery and Son just keeps growing on me, and not just for the cameo appearance that Sheffield makes, where he 'changed / And ate an awful pie, and walked along / The platform to its end'. Interesting, its 'furnace glares' are picked up in another of his great set pieces here, Aubade, where realisation of death's inevitability 'rages out / In furnace-fear'. Behind the voice that could describe life as 'first boredom, then fear', there was a recognition of his own limitations. He didn't like the big, noisy, messy, industrial, modern world and he was scared of death. In one poem, he travels from Oxford to Hull, questioning his life's journey and having a realisation looking out on 'the fumes / And furnace fires' of an industrial city. In the latter, facing the idea of death raises the same image in a more obviously symbolic context. Larkin was in many ways as tragic a figure as Sylvia Plath, though someone doomed to live, rather than electing to die. Perhaps these 'furnaces' give a glimpse of his hellish self-awareness. But before he's damned, he should be recognised as a damned fine poet.