Michael Dirda of the New Criterion takes a fresh look at mid-century British poet Philip Larkin. Dirda finds much to admire in Larkin’s writing and personality, including his awareness of the growth of secularism and hedonism in the culture at large, his daring rejection of literary modernism (which had reigned supreme in his young career when the likes of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were at the height of their influence), and his pragmatic, generally down-the-middle politics:
In his later years Larkin was berated for being conservative, though his true political platform was simple human kindness and decency. “I identify,” he said, “the Right with certain virtues and the Left with certain vices. . . . Thrift, hard work, reverence, desire to preserve—those are the virtues . . . and on the other hand, idleness, greed, and treason.”
Still, Dirda thinks Larkin may not have been quite everything his postmortem admirers crack him up to be, and wonders whether he can truly be called a “great poet”–or merely an author of some truly outstanding poems like Church Going and Annus Mirabilis:
Since [his death], however, his reputation has risen and continues to rise. There may have been a slight blip when Larkin’s private life was first revealed, but posterity is concerned with art, not morals. As Auden observed of Yeats: “You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.” Larkin may have been lustful, vulgar in his correspondence with friends, casually racist, stingy, and deceptive with the women he loved and two-timed. But he was a man of his age, and not very different from you or me, except that he could write “The Whitsun Weddings” and we can’t. A recent article inThe Times proposed a list of “the 50 Best British Writers since 1945”: Larkin was number one, George Orwell was second.
Read Dirda’s entire piece here.
April 24th, 2012 | 9:00 pm
A poem represents the mastering, even if just for a moment, of the pessimism and the melancholy, and enables you – you the poet, and you, the reader – to go on. — Philip Larkin
April 25th, 2012 | 9:17 am
Just what the world needed: another “conservative” appreciation of Larkin. How fresh. How courageous. I am sure Eliot, of the *real* and not-so-new Criterion, would have found Larkin to be the mind-numbingly minor figure that he is. Eliot never relinquished an appreciation for certain new work in various modernist veins (often in the pages of The Criterion). The anglophilic Right’s continuing devotion to dwarfs like Larkin simply makes plain their aesthetic blinders.
Remark: I have read Larkin with pleasure, and would grant him a minor place in anthologies. It’s just his elevation into an exemplar that is thoroughly worthless. Who was the patron saint of the poetic modernists, on the other hand? Dante, who was probably just a little too Italian and Catholic and intellectual for Larkin.
April 25th, 2012 | 9:45 pm
HT, I am not sure if you are referring to Michael Dirda, the writer of “The Times” article or some other person, but Michael Dirda is neither conservative nor a member of the “Right”. I have followed him for years, mostly through his work at the Washington Post, where he was editor for Book World and continues to write book reviews and moderate the Post’s “Reading Room” discussion group. He comes across as an open-minded, honest and modest person of considerable education and culture. I would bet he is left-leaning and a Democrat. He might be an Anglophile, though.
April 26th, 2012 | 9:21 am
Thanks, peg, for the correction on Dirda. I took too literally Mr. Cantarino’s “of” in his first sentence. The New Criterion being a pretty reliable poster boy for the Culture Wars, with a very small roster of regular bloviators, perhaps I can be forgiven that gaffe. If Roger Kimball has finally decided to print something by someone with rather different political (and perhaps cultural) inclinations, it’s cause for rejoicing.
I strongly recommend Keith Tuma’s remarkable Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford), which received no reviews in the literary MSM (e.g. TLS, New Yorker, NYRB, LRB, Times Book Review) as far as I know, and which would be anathema to Kimball. It totally destroys the false narrative that makes someone like Larkin representative of poetic art in those isles in the last century. It is in order of birth, so, amusingly, Larkin sits between Bob Cobbing (an experimentalist) and Donald Davie. Davie, by the way, was a believing Presbyterian who took Pound very seriously and could write well in modes influenced by High Modernism as well as in ordinary meters. There are some other Christians among the modernists therein, also (see Brian Coffey’s beautiful ‘Advent’).
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