Philip Larkin has been somewhat typecast by the poem about your mum and dad. But there are many reasons to dig deeper and share his work as SIMON FINLAY argues…
THE 1955 publication of Philip Larkin’s second volume of work The Less Deceived saw the almost immediate and overnight realisation in the literary world that a major force had arrived. As one of four slim volumes (his first in 1945, The North Ship, went unnoticed) The Less Deceived was succeeded by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and finally High Windows (1974) and led to the impression he was a poet of sparse output, one Larkin was always keen to promote.
As his own harshest critic, he chose what he felt were the best, the very best, of a much larger body of work which lay uncollected until his death in 1985 but was edited and published in full by Anthony Thwaite in 1988. Thwaite believed Larkin may have considered the publication of ‘inferior’ poems might hand ammunition to critics ‘to tear his reputation to pieces’.
Certainly by the 1960s and 1970s, Larkin’s work was in school libraries. The volumes themselves were often excluded but selected poems such as Mr Bleaney, Essential Beauty or Cut Grass would find their way into collections of modern poetry. Whether young minds were being sheltered from his blunt and often excoriating conclusions on parenthood, sex, old age and death I have no idea, but one might suspect that local education authorities might have indulged in a benign and well-meaning form of censorship.
It was often said that Larkin was the poet of the housing estates while others occupied loftier ground and it was a tag he rather enjoyed. If he had accepted the post of Poet Laureate, he would have taken verse to the people in a way no successive holders have done or that the present incumbent ever will.
As a grammar school pupil in the 1970s and early 1980s, not a single Larkin poem was read aloud or discussed in my English classes. I stumbled upon that famous poem about ‘your mum and dad’ in a Sunday colour supplement at 17 and, suddenly, Larkin became very relevant.
I haven’t really put him down since but he led me to Betjeman, Heaney, Muldoon and Stevenson, among others.
It is his ability to distil in a line or phrase an exact moment or thought, sight or sound, sense or emotion that should appeal to the young, like this from The Trees:
‘The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said…’
In MCMXIV, the race for young men to sign up in their hundreds of thousands to fight in France and Belgium in the Great War only to be mown down was summarised thus:
‘Never such innocence
Never before or since
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.’
Larkin has a sense of mischief, too. In Church Going, he praises faintly the building before concluding this ‘serious house’ be a place for someone to grow wise in ‘if only that so many dead lie round’.
Like Church Going, his poems often have a pay off and it is never more powerful when he writes of death – the ‘coming dark’, ‘the only end of age’ or the ‘anaesthetic from which none come round’ – and which seemed to preoccupy much of the last 30 years of his life and when he was at the height of his powers.
Larkin remains arguably our best-loved poet, who was justly proud of the recognition he gained in life, if reluctant at the ‘celebrity’ his success brought.
The eventual notoriety in death – accusations of racism and misogyny he was unable to counter – help to bring another layer of human frailty to a man ‘just like us’ but who, in reality, with his towering intellect and gift, was anything but.
Larkin in a classic diffident pose (Photograph copyright The Observer)
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