“One day I hope I can write happier poems, but most of the things I think about aren’t very cheerful.” — poet Philip Larkin

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t STUDY poets! You READ them and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn. At the end of it you can’t say, That’s Yeats, that’s Auden, because they’ve gone, they’re like a scaffolding that’s been taken down. Thomas was a dead end. What effects? Yeats and Auden, the management of lines, the formal distancing of emotion. Hardy, well … not to be afraid of the obvious. All those wonderful dicta about poetry – ‘the poet should touch our hearts by showing his own,’ ‘the poet takes note of nothing that he cannot feel,’ ‘the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own’ – Hardy knew what it was all about.” — Philip Larkin, Paris Review interview

It’s Philip Larkin’s birthday. Born in 1922.

This is probably his most famous. For fairly obvious reasons. The first line alone …

 
 

This Be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin’s influence on his generation and the one directly following (Christopher Hitchens could barely write a paragraph without mentioning him) was massive, and it was all based on four slim volumes. I did not study literature in college. My background in English, as they call it, was the education I got from the standard curriculum in high school. “Humanities” class was a sweeping survey course – where I first read Dickinson, Whitman, Langston Hughes, Shelley (“Ozymandias” only), Matthew Arnold (“ignorant armies clash by night”), all the Big Wigs. I was impressionable enough that it STUCK. Then I moved on to college, where I studied acting. I have spent my life “filling in the blanks” of my haphazard education. Philip Larkin was for sure not on any curriculum in high school, and he just never came across my radar. If you don’t know, you don’t know, and I didn’t know. Eventually, through a poetry newsletter I subscribed to in the late 90s, Larkin floated across my view. Once I knew OF him, of course I started to see references to him everywhere.

Larkin was born in 1922, looped in – against his will – with what was called “The Movement”, a group of Oxford University undergraduates who defined themselves against excess in language and sentiment. Basically, their whole thing was a rebellion against Dylan Thomas, who created a magnetic field of influence impossible to resist. Larkin, though, wasn’t really part of this. He was not a joiner. He did not live in London, he did not circulate with other writers. He and Kingsley Amis were lifelong friends and collaborators, but he wasn’t immersed in the “scene”.


Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Hilary Amis

Like Thomas Hardy, Larkin had religious doubts, although he is more nostalgic about belief than Hardy was. The second Hardy lost his belief, he slammed the door shut on faith forever. Larkin still yearned for it, even when he could no longer believe. Larkin’s poem “Church Going” is an ache.

Church Going
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
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.
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.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate 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,
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,
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
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?
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
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 be my representative,

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,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
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,
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.

Along with his poetry, Larkin was also a music critic, who delighted in attacking avant-garde jazz. He felt the experiments threatened the cohesion of civilization. Larkin wasn’t kidding around. He was EXTREME. The poetry that came out of Larkin’s extremity pulses with nostalgia and pain – but also a kind of coldness and flatness, like all the pain that happened to him happened long long ago. I read some of his poems and sometimes feel a dim GONG of alarm deep inside me. Like: Oh. No. Don’t read that right now. Larkin’s pain comes from cynicism and awareness, awareness that his views made him an exile from the world of warmth and love and companionship. He’s clocked as a reactionary, and there’s some truth in that, although he speaks more from loss than anger. He knows the past can’t be re-captured. It’s impossible.

The stream-of-consciousness chatter of the confessional poets, Larkin’s contemporaries, comes from an entirely different world. Larkin has none of that. He had relationships with women, but in general he lived a quiet solitary life. He was the librarian at the University of Hull for thirty years. Writers who visited England and wanted to meet Larkin had to travel to Kingston on Hull to see him. Many made the trek.

In 1984, a year before he died, Larkin was offered the poet laureate post in England – which is so hilarious to me. Read “Church Going” or “This Be the Verse” and try to picture him writing some commemorative ode to a monarch. True to form, he turned down the post. He died the following year. His poems were always somewhat controversial, and when his correspondence was published posthumously, he was even more controversial since his private thoughts were not, how you say, politically correct. None of this touched Larkin’s status as one of the best post-war poets in England. In 2016, a plaque for Larkin was added to Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.

I love his poems “Faith Healing”, “Church Going”, “The Whitsun Weddings”, “Talking in Bed”, “Here” – but today I will post his poem “High Windows”, because it captures what I’ve been trying to say here.

The danger of nostalgia is that it can reject the “new” as inherently bad. I’m sure Larkin had a little of that going on. He thought much of what went on in contemporary life was silly and stupid. However, on the flip side, he appealed to the counter-culture too – I mean, read “This Be the Verse” again. An entire generation can probably recite it by heart.

Here, in “High Windows”, written in the late 60s, and published in 1974, shows Larkin – an older man by then – looking around at the changes in the world. Socially conservative people in the 1960s looked at the changes – in mores, in sexual behavior, in “respect for your elders”, etc. – and saw the decline of Western civilization and its values. People who don’t read Larkin closely may think he would agree with all of that. Nope. He sees the changes and declares them “paradise.”

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds.
And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

QUOTES:

Clive James, The New Yorker, July 17, 1989:

The voice was unmistakable. It made misery beautiful.

Martin Amis, introduction to his collection of Larkin’s poems, 2013

Larkin’s originality was palpable.

Christopher Hitchens:

About suffering he was seldom wrong.

Philip Larkin:

Deprivation for me is what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Kingsley Amis, memoirs:

In 1950 or so, I sent him my sprawling first draft [of Lucky Jim] and got back what amounted to a synopsis of the first third of the structure and other things besides. He decimated characters that, in carried-away style, I had poured into the tale without any care for the plot.

Christopher Hitchens, on Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin:

Both men thought of boredom as a form of tyranny and also (more important) as a symptom of it. To them, the bores of the world were not merely tedious. They were, by their dogma and repetition and righteousness, advertising an evil will to power.

Martin Amis, introduction to his collection of Larkin’s poems, 2013

Larkin is not a poet’s poet. He is of course a people’s poet, which is what he would have wanted. But he is also, definingly, a novelist’s poet. It is the novelists who revere him.

Clive James, The New Yorker, July 17, 1989:

Though Larkin’s diffidence was partly a pose, his reticence was authentic. At no point did he announce he had built a better mousetrap. The world had to prove it by beating a path to his door. The process took time, but was inexorable, and by now, only three years after his death, at the age of sixty-three, it has reached a kind of apotheosis.

Philip Larkin:

What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the hands of a critical industry which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this I do rather lay at the door of Eliot and Pound … first of all you have to be terribly educated, you have to read everything to know these things, and secondly you’ve got somehow to work them in to show that you are working them in. But to me, the whole of the ancient world, the whole of classical and biblical mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writer’s duty to be original.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, October 25, 1957:

Now [W.D. Snodgrass] turns out to be better than anyone except Larkin (Randall [Jarrell] by the way, likes Larkin as much as I do: “I was just delighted with what you said about Larkin. I’m crazy about him. Say what you will, there’s a surprising amount of objectivity in taste.”) His–Snodgrass’s–poems are much more personal than Larkin’s remind one a little of Vaughan and Traherne with a Loforgue-like wit and a perfect ear.

Christopher Hitchens, review of John Updike’s essays, one of which is about Larkin’s Collected Poems:

Those of us who adore this work have a tendency to feel personally addressed by it and to resent any other commentators as interlopers. Updike seems almost to know what we are thinking. It’s of interest, also, that his own vestigial Christianity–or do I mean surviving attachment to Christianity?–proves on other pages to be not dissimilar to Larkin’s own synthesis, in “Aubade” and in “Church Going”, of a bleak materialism fused with an admiration for the liturgy and the architecture.

Clive James, The New Yorker, July 17, 1989:

Lines by Larkin are the common property of everyone in Britain who reads seriously at all–a state of affairs which has not obtained since the time of Tennyson.

Philip Larkin, 1973 letter:

Middle age is depressing anyway. The things one tries to forget get bigger and bigger.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

His work is controversial not in itself but in what he represents to poets and critics of different camps. He certainly did as much as Housman to turn back the clock of English poetry; like Housman, he is the modern poet most often quoted – in church, in Parliament, in the classroom–by folk who latch on to a phrase or stanza, without bothering to understand what the poem as a whole might mean. His was the characteristic voice of the 1950s and 1960s, regarded by some as the most significant English poet of the postwar.

Clive James, Observer, November 25, 1983:

An impulse to preserve which thrived on loss.

Philip Larkin, All What Jazz:

[Coltrane’s] solos seem to me to bear the same relation to proper jazz solos as those drawings of running dogs, showing their legs in all positions so that they appear to have about fifty of them, have to real drawings. Once, they are amusing and even instructive. But the whole point of drawing is to choose the right line, not drawing fifty alternatives. Again, Coltrane’s choice and treatment of themes is hypnotic, repetitive, monotonous: he will rock backwards and forwards between two chords for five minutes, or pull a tune to pieces like someone subtracting petals from a flower.

Martin Amis, introduction to his collection of Larkin’s poems, 2013

The poems are transparent (they need no mediation), yet they tantalize the reader with glimpses of an impenetrable self: so much yearning, so much debility; an eros that self-thwarts and self-finesses. This is what rivets us: the mystery story of Larkin’s soul.

Christopher Hitchens, review of Letters to Monica:

Both [Larkin and George Orwell] had an abiding love for the English countryside and a haunting fear of its obliteration at the hands of “developers”. (Here I would cite Larkin’s poem Going, Going and Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air.) Both were openly scornful of Christianity but maintained a profound respect for the scripture and the Anglican liturgy, as well as for the masterpiece of English ecclesiastical architecture. (See Larkin’s poem Church Going and the same Orwell novel, as well as numberless of his letters and reviews.) They each cherished the famous English affection for animals and were revolted by any instances of human cruelty to them. (Here consult Larkin’s poem Myxamatosis, about the extirpation of the country’s rabbit population, as well as at least one Orwell source that’s too obvious to require mentioning.

Philip Larkin:

I shouldn’t normally show what I’d written to anyone; what would be the point? You remember Tennyson reading an unpublished poem to Jowett; when he had finished, Jowett said, I shouldn’t publish that if I were you, Tennyson. Tennyson replied, If it comes to that, Master, the sherry you gave us at lunch was downright filthy. That’s about all that can happen.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, June 15, 1964

Larkin is the librarian at Hull, a legendary figure, seldom seen in London.

Philip Larkin, unpublished memoir:

When I try to tune into my childhood, the dominant emotions I pick up are, overwhelmingly, fear and boredom … I never left the house without the sense of walking into a cooler, cleaner, saner and pleasanter atmosphere.

Christopher Hitchens:

… his chosen career as a librarian led him to live in Belfast, Britain’s (and Ireland’s) most immiserated and forbidding city, at the cusp of the 1940s and ’50s. His political sympathies can scarcely have been Republican, but a description of an Orange Day rally is one of the best short evocations of massed boorish fanaticism I have ever read. “It was a parade of staggering dullness (every face wore the same ‘taking himself seriously’ expression) & stupefying hypocrisy.”

Michael Schmidt:

Part of his understatement is that he works from below, as it were, not cutting down a large Romantic subject by irony but, by counterirony, building a subject up. When he is being savage about the poor, the old, the uncultured, we can be sure that by the end of the poem they will have been understood and celebrated, the savagery having been redirected at himself, his attitude, his circumstances.

Clive James, The New Yorker, July 17, 1989:

Art, if it knows how to wait, wins out. Larkin had patience. For him, poetry was a life sentence. He set happiness aside to make room for it.

Philip Larkin, All What Jazz:

[The critic] must hold on to the principle that the only reason for praising a work is that it pleases, and the way to develop his critical sense is to be more acutely aware of whether he is being pleased or not.

^^ I really love this.

Clive James, Cultural Cohesion:

[Larkin] can call up death more powerfully than almost any other poet ever has, but he does so in the commanding voice of life. His linguistic exuberance is the heart of him.

Elizabeth Bishop, letter to Robert Lowell, July 30, 1964

That kind of defiant English rottenness–too strong a word–but a sort of piggish-ness!–As if they’ve thrown off Victorianism, Georgeianism, Radicalism of the ’30s–and now let’s all give up together. Even Larkin’s poetry is a bit too easily resigned to grimness, don’t you think? Oh, I am all for grimness and horrors of every sort–but you can’t have them, either, by shortcuts–by just saying it.

Christopher Hitchens:

And without that synthesis of gloom and angst we could never have had his Aubade, a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counterpoise between the stoic philosophy of Lucretius and David Jume, and his own frank terror of oblivion.

Clive James, Encounter, June 1974:

It has always seemed to me a great pity that Larkin’s more intelligent critics should content themselves with finding his view of life circumscribed. It is, but it is also bodied forth as art to a remarkable degree. There is a connection between the circumscription and the poetic intensity, and it’s no surprise that the critics who can’t see the connection can’t see the separation either. They seem to think that just because the poet is (self-admittedly) emotionally wounded, the poetry is wounded too. There is always the suggestion that Larkin might handle his talent better if he were a more well-rounded character. That Larkin’s gift might be part and parcel of his own peculiar nature isn’t a question they have felt called upon to deal with.

Clive James, Encounter, June 1974, on “The Building”:

He himself is well aware that there are happier ways of viewing life. It’s just that he is incapable of sharing them, except for fleeting moments–and the fleeting moments do not accumulate, whereas the times in between them do.

Philip Larkin:

I admire Murder in the Cathedral as much as anything Eliot ever wrote. I read it from time to time for pleasure, which is the highest compliment I can pay. I didn’t know [Eliot]. Once I was in the Faber offices – the old oens, 24 Russell Square, that magic address! – talking to Charles Monteith, and he said, Have you ever met Eliot? I said no, and to my astonishment he stepped out and reappeared with Eliot, who must have been in the next room. We shook hands, and he explained that he was expecting someone to tea and couldn’t stay. There was a pause, and he said, I’m glad to see you in this office. The significance of that was that I wasn’t a Faber author – it must have been before 1964, when they published The Whitsun Weddings – and I took it as a great compliment. But it was a shattering few minutes, I hardly remember what I thought.

Clive James, The New Yorker, July 17, 1989:

Larkin, in his unchecked personal despair, is a sacrificial goat with the sexual outlook of a stud bull. He thinks, and sometimes speaks, like a Robert Crumb character who has never recovered from being beaten up by a girl in the third grade.

Philip Larkin:

I didn’t know [Auden] either. I met Auden once at Stephen Spender’s house, which was very kind of Spender, and in a sense he was more frightening than Eliot. I remember he said, Do you like living in Hull? and I said, I don’t suppose I’m unhappier there than I should be anywhere else. To which he replied, Naughty, naughty. I thought that was very funny.

Clive James, The New Yorker, July 17, 1989:

Seeing the world as the hungry and thirsty see food and drink, he describes it for the benefit of those who are at home in it, their senses dulled by satiation. The reader asks: How can a man who feels like this bear to live at all?

Philip Larkin, All What Jazz:

The marvelous “Blue Horizon”, six choruses of slow blues in which [Sidney] Bechet climbs without interruption or hurry from lower to upper register, his clarinet tone at first thick and throbbing, then soaring like Melba in an extraordinary blend of lyricism and power that constituted the unique Bechet voice, commanding attention the instant it sounded.

Philip Larkin:

Dylan Thomas came to Oxford to speak to a club I belonged to, and we had a drink the following morning. HE wasn’t frightening. In fact, and I know it sounds absurd to say so, but I should say I had more in common with Dylan Thomas than with any other “famous writer” in this sort of context.

Philip Larkin, All What Jazz:

With John Coltrane’s metallic and passionless nullity gave way to exercises in gigantic absurdity, great boring excursions on not-especially-attractive themes during which all possible changes were rung, extended investigations of oriental tedium, long-winded and portentous demonstrations of religiosity.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, describes it thus:

He does not idealize the past. He does not see it, in Hardy’s terms, as unrealized, either. It is simply unrealizable. Not Wordsworth’s infant trailing clouds of glory behind whom gates of the prison-house close; not Brownings’ “Never the time and the place / And the loved one all together” or even Hardy’s “Everything glowed with a gleam; / But we were looking away.” There was no cloud-trailing infant, no all together, no glow. Yet from these poets Larkin took crucial bearings. Death is his abiding muse, not love or even lust, with its temporary solaces.

Clive James, Cultural Cohesion:

A romantic sensibility classically disciplined, [Larkin] is, in the only sense of the word likely to last, modern after all. By rebuilding the ruined bridge between poetry and the general reading public he has given his art a future, and you can’t get more modern than that.

Philip Larkin:

You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like Finnegans Wake and Picasso.

Clive James, The New Yorker, July 17, 1989:

As for High Windows, the last collection published while he was alive, it may contain, in “The Building,” his single most terror-stricken–and, indeed, terrifying–personal outcry against the intractable fact of death, but it begins and ends with the author well in the background.

Philip Larkin:

Of course, the days when Tennyson would publish a sonnet telling Gladstone what to do about foreign policy are over. It’s funny that Kipling, who is what most people think of as a poet as national spokesman, never was laureate. He should have had it when Bridges was appointed, but it’s typical that he didn’t – the poet isn’t thought of in that way. It really is a genuine attempt to honor someone.

Martin Amis, The Guardian, 2011

Larkin’s life was a pitiful mess of evasion and poltroonery; his work was a triumph. That’s the one to choose if (as he believed) you can’t have both. The life rests in peace; the work lives on.

Clive James, The New Yorker, July 17, 1989:

From his desolation he built masterpieces.

Philip Larkin:

After [Hardy], Yeats came to seem so artificial – all that crap about masks and Crazy Jane and all the rest. It all rang so completely unreal.

Michael Schmidt:

Why is a poet of such unoptimistic temperament so popular? Perhaps most of all because of the insidiousness of his verse, the way that after one or two readings it lodges in memory. It has, with its characteristic details, its spoken tones, its formal assurance, the sound of truth, and a poet who speaks bleak truths is probably more valuable than one who gives us airy and empty consolations. The candor of Larkin is different in kind from the candor of Lowell and Plath, not more English, precisely, but more democratic. His truths (if they are true) carry at least the consolation of clarity, unfuzzed by darkly autobiographical resentment.

Philip Larkin, letter, December 1954:

If it were announced that all sex would cease on 31 December, my way of life wouldn’t change at all.

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9 Responses to “One day I hope I can write happier poems, but most of the things I think about aren’t very cheerful.” — poet Philip Larkin

  1. seang says:

    Ah, the Larkin touch! Yeah, for bleak truths! Larkin could have written a great screenplay for Mike Leigh. Always liked that poem that compared either Sydney Bechet’s or Louis Armstrong’s sound to an “enormous yes”. Cool Larkin post, Thanks!

  2. red says:

    Seang – love the idea of pairing him with Mike Leigh. An “enormous yes” to that!! Glad you liked. He’s great.

  3. Michael Schmidt says:

    I do enjoy your blog. But then I would, wouldn’t I!

  4. red says:

    Michael Schmidt? The Michael Schmidt?

    Wow. Mr Schmidt, as is probably obvious by now – I LOVE your book. Thank you for writing it!

  5. Jack says:

    ; we should be careful
    Of each other,

    7 words towards the end of a poem. Such beauty.

  6. Bryan Summers says:

    My favorite poem of all time is also the most hopeful of Larkin’s poems.

    First Sight

    Lambs that learn to walk in snow
    When their bleating clouds the air
    Meet a vast unwelcome, know
    Nothing but a sunless glare.
    Newly stumbling to and fro
    All they find, outside the fold,
    Is a wretched width of cold.

    As they wait beside the ewe,
    Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
    Hidden round them, waiting too,
    Earth’s immeasureable surprise.
    They could not grasp it if they knew,
    What so soon will wake and grow
    Utterly unlike the snow.

    • sheila says:

      I just got goosebumps. He really was amazing at those final lines wasn’t he?

      // Meet a vast unwelcome //

      jeez. incredible.

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