The University of Hull

2010/2011 Public Lecture Series

Philip Larkin, Life or Art

The University of Hulls Larkin 25 Lecture
Date: Monday 22 November 2010, 6pm Venue: Middleton Hall, Campus, Hull Speaker: Professor James Booth

Duration:

0:54:24 START AUDIO

Announcer:

Welcome to the fourth lecture in the University of Hulls Larkin 25 series of podcasts; Philip Larkin, Life or Art, given by Professor James Booth from the Universitys Department of English.

Prof James Booth: Philip Larkin, Life or Art; Aristotle, as we all know, wrote that art imitates life and this is a pretty solid commonsensical way of looking at it. The poet lives and the incidence of his or her life give

the occasions for the poems; a visit to a cathedral, falling in love, the death of a loved one. However there is also the hardcore decadent version. This comes in two variants. In the first, and the more familiar of these, the poet lives deliberately or subconsciously in accordance with an artistic myth. In extreme cases the myth dictates the literal events of the life. Byron invents himself as a cursed glamorous hero in his writings and to prove the point throws his life away fighting for a romantic cause in Greece. Sylvia Plath, with a deliberation that shocked Larkin, dictated the myth of her victimhood at the hands of Ted Hughes; There is a panther stalks me down, one day Ill have my death of him. She then lived out this myth by committing suicide when Hughes deserted her. Byron and Plath, if you like, paid with their lives for their self-image as artists. WB Yeats did not go to that extreme but he did see the artist as fundamentally abnormal, antisocial, as weve just heard. And David anticipated, uncannily I think, several of the elements of my talk here. But as weve just heard The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work. And if it take the second, must refuse a heavenly mansion raging in the dark. The artist, like a Christian saint, a kind of anti-saint perhaps, renounces the rules and decorums of ordinary life in order to achieve the perfection of art. In Yeatss dramatic phrase The poet rages in the dark while others fulfil their social commitments and take the road to their heavenly mansions.

Following his own principles Yeats made his life into the glamorous myth of a sage in a tower, buying himself Thoor Ballylee and then writing his poems in the symbolic isolation of this tower. This is no simple matter of metaphorical art versus literal life. Thoor Ballylee is both literal and a symbol. The process of living involves a continual metaphorical transfer between literal and figurative, concrete and abstract. Were all literally here in the Middleton Hall but what makes sense to each individual one of us of being here will be something profoundly subjective and imaginative in each one of our heads. In TS Elliots words you can hardly say where the metaphorical and literal meet. Christopher Ricks adds: The concept of the literal is itself stubbornly resistant to clarification. Although we use the word all the time and we think we know what it means, dont we? Larkins poetry is distinctive for teasing intense figurative meaning from literal description. Instead of metaphor My love is like a red red rose, The evening spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table, he prefers metonym, a description of reality which suggests some larger, more abstract concept. That vase representing the sadness of home, a glimpse from a train of someone running up to bowl invoking transience. Since there is nothing which is purely literal, the more innocently real an image the greater perhaps is its metaphorical potential. Someone running up to bowl, though an empirical visual observation, is a more highly charged metaphor than the familiar comparison of ones love to a rose. In his last great poem Aubade, Larkin experiences his final epiphany as the light of dawn gradually fills his room. This

revelation takes the form of a wardrobe; It stands plain as a wardrobe what we know. A wardrobe is, of course, a man sized wooden box. Get it? Is this an image from life or from art? It is, of course, just a wardrobe and he sees it. You could make a very lame image out of it but obviously it resonates. Is it excruciatingly literal or is it equally excruciatingly a really subtle metaphor? Larkin too had his towers like Yeats, vantage points from which he viewed life at a safe or perhaps an unsafe distance. Frequently they take the form of a bohemian attic or garret. In January 1946 at the age of 23 he moved into new lodgings in Wellington, Shropshire and found that his window faced east towards the rising son. As the days lengthened he was woken earlier and earlier in the morning. The impact of this experience went deep. In many of his poems a light-filled room figures as the sight of a revelation, either an epiphany of transcendent or, as in Dry Point or Livings II, the lighthouse keeper poem or of less deceived reality and disappointment of tragedy as in Deceptions or, as weve just seen, in Aubade. Another tower was provided by the new rooms in Belfast into which Larkin moved five years later in 1951. Romantic attics and delightful they are, he wrote to his friend Winifred Arnott. Here he would be able to write his poems and play his records of jazz and of Monteverdi. He was into Monteverdi even at that stage interestingly. And here also he wrote his poem Best Society alluding to Eves words as she leaves Adam in Miltons Paradise Lost, For solitude is sometimes best society.

Our virtues, he complains, are all social and consequently he makes his choice for antisocial vice. Viciously then I lock my door, the gas fire breathes, the wind outside ushers in evening rain. Once more uncontradicting solitude supports me on its giant palm. And like a sea anemone or simple snail there cautiously unfolds emerges what I am. No heavenly mansion of social responsibility and virtue here for Larkin, Viciously then I lock my door and what goes on behind that locked door is his own business. He finds himself. When he moved to Hull four years later in 1955, Larkin found himself eventually in the top floor flat of 32 Pearson Park with its view of the Deep blue air that shows nothing and is nowhere and is endless. His new post also required him to build his own tower, this must have seemed quite delightful to the young poet and Im sure he saw what was happening and relished the peculiar interaction between literal and metaphorical. He was charged with building a new library. The eminent Viennese sculpture, [?? 0:08:34] was to decorate the building and many of us here will be familiar with his images above the two library entrances. In 1959 Larkin wrote to Judy [Edgerton 0:08:44] I quite like his owl, I wish I felt so sure about his genius of light, an abstract figure bearing a torch that is already scrawled in rough over the front door. The figure, as many of you will know, puns the name of the universitys founder, Thomas Ferens. Ferens in Latin means bearing of carrying hence the Universitys motto Lampada ferens,

bearing the lamp. Larkin always appreciated a good or, as here, preferably a bad pun. The original bearer of light, Lucifer, even more sinful than Eve, of course, also rejected a heavenly mansion for the sake of something more imaginatively interesting. So for the whole of his mature life the poet-librarian entered his place of work, which eventually became the tower of light we now see, through the door beneath this light bearing figure. As the library expanded over time and adopted new technology and as Larkin became ever more deaf, he felt more and more isolated in the metaphorical retreat he had created for himself. In his symbolist poem, Livings II, written in 1971 the metaphor for his work is, instead of a toad, a lighthouse keepers lonely dedication to his lamp. And in this case, this is one of his poems and he did write plenty of them actually which do you pretty vertiginous metaphor proper, librarian Larkin sitting in his library there is like a lighthouse keeper make the simile out of it in a tower above the slavering suds of the sea. Well, My love is like a red, red, rose, shes got pillar box red cheeks has she? No, you know, its that kind of metaphor, its an emotional leap that one needs to swallow whole. But its there and I think no one can deny it must have something to do with where and how Larkin was working at the time. Seventy feet down the sea explodes upwards relapsing to slaver off landing stage steps, running suds rejoice. Barometers falling, ports wind-shuttered, fleets pent like hounds, fires in humped inns kippering sea pictures, keep it all off. By night snow swerves oh loose moth world through the stair travelling leather black waters.

Guarded by brilliance I set plate and spoon and after divining cards. Lit shelved liners grope like mad worlds westwards. Larkin admired a houseman for the narrow yet unforgettable metaphor he made of his own life. Here he makes a narrow metaphor of librarian ship. The practical chore of tending the lamp simplifies the speakers life to its essentials. He prefers his satisfyingly uncomfortable tower to the sociable cosy inns of warmth on the mainland with a leisure enjoyed by those without his antisocial vocation, Keep it all off. This innocuous Lucifer, guarded by brilliance, sits down in sullen isolation to pass the time with his divining cards. In literal terms perhaps library committee minutes or, more cynically perhaps, even his poetry. But let us return to the beginning. On the 7 th of April 1946, when I was exactly one year and one day old, a 23-year-old Philip Larkin wrote to his friend James Sutton. In my character there is an antipathy between art and life he puts them in inverted commas, already hes not quite sure about how youre supposed to take the words. You know, are they literal, are they metaphorical? In my character I find theres an antipathy between art and life. I find that once I give in to another person there is a slackening and dulling of the peculiar artistic fibres that makes it impossible to achieve that mental clenching that crystallises a pattern and keeps it still while you draw it. As Sutton, to whom hes writing, was an artist so they often use artistic metaphors. This letting in of a second person spells death to perception and the desire to express as well as the ability. Time and time again I feel that before I write anything else at all I must drag myself out of

the water, shake myself dry and sit down on a lonely rock to contemplate glittering loneliness. Marriage, of course, since you mentioned marriage, is impossible if one wants to do this. Like Miltons feminist Eve, in order to see the world clearly he needs to be free from the constraints of domesticity. At this point the young poet was entangled in his first relationship with Ruth Bowman whom hed met two-and-a-half years earlier when hed moved from Oxford to the library in Wellington in Shropshire. Shed then been a 16-year-old schoolgirl and hed just turned 21. As things developed, of course, she naturally wanted him to marry her. He, or part of him, certainly wanted to marry her. DH Lawrence was a greater hero to Lark than Yeats and Lawrence was full of contempt for artists who prefer art to life. Lawrence demands that the reader join him in the thick of the scrimmage. Larkin wrote to his school friend Jim Sutton how catching sight of Sons and Lovers on his bookshelf he felt he could see the book breathing slightly. So he was somewhat in awe of this organic life affirming principle that Lawrence represented. Throughout his youth he strained to achieve a Lawrencian commitment to life. Now in September 1946, just as he left Wellington for a new post in Leicester University College and things obviously became rather intense with Ruth, he wrote Wedding Wind dramatising the ecstatic joy of a newly married farmers wife in terms which suggest the [?? 0:15:26] women at the beginning of the rainbow. Perhaps this poetic therapy would persuade him into action. The woman in the poem has lain overwhelmed by happiness through her windblown wedding night while her husband attended to the frightened horses. Now in the day alls ravelled under the sun by

the winds blowing. He has gone to look at the floods and I carry a chipped pail to the chicken run, set it down and stare. All is the wind hunting through clouds and forests, thrashing my apron and the hanging cloths on the line. Can it be born 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. Can even death dry up these newly delighted lakes, conclude our kneeling as cattle by all generous waters. Now that perpetual morning shares her bed death seems impossibility. No wardrobes here. The poem became a key work in Larkins construction of his mature oeuvre. Its the only one of that important early group of his poems in which he adopts a womans voice which survives into his mature oeuvre, he kept it until The Less Deceived and put it in. Thats by far the earliest poem in The Less Deceived and obviously it meant a lot to him. And in a sense it is his first originative poem. Appropriately enough, in view of the way his oeuvre was to conclude it is an Aubade, a song greeting the dawn. As an impersonal work of art the poem retains its perfection. As therapy, however, it misfired miserably. Within days Ruth told him that she might be pregnant. Dismayed, Larkin at once wrote a very different Aubade. In at the chiming of light upon sleep a male speaker cowers in his bed in fear of the morning and more than morning which floods into his room. He had been dreaming of a clenched evergreen world of frost and unchanging holly. Now the light and warmth of morning 9

provoked procreative desire and pitch him into the cycle of nature. Hes compelled to fulfil his biological destiny and expend himself. From spring blossom comes fruit and with fruit comes decay. Love, which is merely deaths harbinger, hangs everywhere its light and he cant escape it. With a wild pun on his failure to use a condom he sees himself repeating the original sin of Adam. In this one poem its almost unique I think, he gets the sin, vice, virtue antagonism the other way around, antithesis the wrong way round. Unsheaf the life you carry and die cries the cock on the crest of the sun. Unlock the words and seeds that drove Adam out of his undeciduous grove. Its not a very good poem, its got a lot of apocalyptic kind of language in it, very different from Wedding Wind. Hes unsheathed his life in sex, spent his seed and his wages are death. In the event, after three more years of havering and accusing himself of being a Willy wet leg, Larkin the artist made his choice. He escaped to a job in Belfast across the Irish sea. He might be able to create beautiful art out of a vision of marriage but as an artist he could not himself make such a commitment to life. As he wrote to Jim Sutton before setting out to Ireland, Despite my fine feelings, when it really comes down to terms of furniture and loans from the bank something unmeltable and immovable rises up in me, something infantile, cowardly, regressive. But it wont be conquered, Im a romantic bastard. Remote things seem desirable, bring them close and I start shitting myself. Remote things seem desirable, bring them close and I start shitting myself. The time honoured manoeuvre by which male poets this sounds gendered, Im not sure it is, I think Sylvia Plaths problem was that

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she married her muse. Had she kept Ted Hughes as a muse with the respectable distance then it might have worked. But anyway, the time honoured manoeuvre is, of course, the muse relationship. Here one parks ones life out of the way in order to concentrate on art, mythifying ones possible sexual partner, ones life commitment into an abstract muse which doesnt cause nearly so much trouble. Dante saw Beatrice for the first time when he was nine and she eight. He was instantly taken with her and she remained his muse after both she and he had married others and after she had died at the age of 24. Petrarchs Laura was already married to someone else when the poet first saw her and his passion for her was not one of carnal desire and pursuit but of ideal inspiration though in Petrarchs case, as in Larkins I think, there is an ambiguity between Eros and agape if you like. Neither Ruth nor Monica Jones, whom Larkin met in Leicester and who was his lover for 36 years, could possibly have been his muse. His relationships with them lacked the essential difference. They represented wives or entanglements. If youve been reading the Letters to Monica youll see this isnt in any sense an ideal muse relationship and wasnt even from the very start, although its extremely intense and close as well see. Winifred Arnott, however, was most certainly a muse. Shortly after his move to Belfast Larkins eye was caught by this 21-year-old Library assistant. Nothing developed between them beyond a casual friendship but for this very reason this is one of the most poetically happy of all his relationships.

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Winifred recollected later He was a working colleague, seven years older than me, already balding. I was 21, I didnt think of him like that. Heres the difference between the muse and the poet, its vertiginous, you go from one to the other. Theres almost no connection. In Latest Face, written in February 1951, Larkin wrote with Winifred in mind, the purest muse poem in his work. Latest face, so effortless your great arrival at my eyes. No one standing near could guess your beauty had no home til then. Very egocentric the poet confronted with the muse, the muse his own creation really. Latest face, so effortless your great arrival at my eyes. No one standing near could guess your beauty had no home til then. Precious vagrant, recognise my look and do not turn again. Admirer and admired embrace on a useless level where I contain your current grace, you my judgement. Yet to move into real untidy air brings no lasting attribute, bargains, suffering and love, not this always planned salute. Despite the fact that he wrote Winifreds name over and over again on the draft this is an utterly dispassionate poem. The vagrant face is not personalised and imposes no demands or obligations. This always planned salute is precious precisely because it is useful, it will have no issue. Indeed the poet is fearful of what might ensue should the statue of your beauty walk, springing to life like Pygmalions perfect statue. He has no desire to pursue or to possess, he doesnt want to wade behind the faces owner into the real untidy air of bargains, suffering and love.

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Here Larkin gives a different twist, but perhaps equally familiar, to Yeatss choice. This artist chooses, not between perfection of the work and perfection of the life, but between the perfection of art and the untidy imperfection of life. As in Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter. Consummation would only bring disappointment. When Winifred increased her muse inaccessibility by becoming to someone else at the end of 1952 Larkin became a whole lot more affectionate as she recalls, writing his great early masterpiece, Lines of a Young Ladys Photograph Album. But real women, from Dantes Beatrice to Don Quixotes Dulcinea del Toboso, have no interest in their muse status. Muses exist only in the eyes of poets. As she wrote later, she was too preoccupied with preparations for her wedding to be bothered with the poems he sent her. I felt Oh what a bore, I dont want any more of this, Ive left him behind. He had chosen art, she had chosen life. A choice which, of course, shes never regretted. In 1959 both Monica Joness parents died within a short period leaving her inconsolable. Larkins misery at not being able to help her in her distress is reflected in his greatest direct love poem. He wrote a lot of indirect love poems, if one wants to interpret them in that way, with Monica in mind but this one, I think, is pretty direct, Talking in Bed. Its at the furthest remove possible from a muse poem. Talking in bed ought to be easiest. Lying together there goes back so far, an emblem of two people being honest. Yet more and more time passes silently. Outside the winds incomplete unrest builds and disperses clouds about the sky and dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why at this 13

unique distance from isolation it becomes still more difficult to find words at once true and kind or not untrue and not unkind. As in the case of Wedding Wind, any potential therapy intended by this great poem was totally ineffective. As art it is perfect, as life it is useless. As Larkins other great model, Auden, famously wrote, Poetry makes nothing happen. Monicas desolate grief traumatised the poet and left him with an unshakeable lifelong loyalty to her which would last the duration, however wearing and joyless their intimacy might and did ultimately become. He says it explicitly in several letters. This was a turning point in their relationship, he was committed but it didnt have the [allow 0:28:02] of the relationship with, say, Winifred. In the following year, 1960, Philip found himself attracted by the ingenuous joie de vivre of a young colleague he was coaching for her librarianship examinations, Maeve Brennan. Maeve, Larkins coy Hull mistress, was a perfect muse, innocent and inaccessible. She lived with her parents and held to strict Catholic principles, particularly when it came to pre-marital sex. The key to their love was a total cross-purpose. She offered him the perpetual insipience of unconsummated longing, remote things seem desirable. He offered her a flattering, if somewhat overlong courtship, which she expected to end in the sacrament of marriage. And she carried on expecting this year after year after year. She misinterpreted his aestheticism, if you like, as a spirituality similar to her Catholic theological spirituality. It was, if you like, a tale of two narcisms, that of the poet perfecting his art and that of the feminine ego craving attention.

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The poetic result of this relationship was broadcast occasioned by Maeves attendance at a concert at the Hull City Hall in November 1961 to which Larkin listened live on the radio. I think of your face among all those faces, beautiful and devout, before cascades of monumental slithering. One of your gloves unnoticed on the floor beside those new slightly outmoded shoes. Here it goes quickly dark. Behind the glowing wavebands rabid storms of chording, by being distant overpower my mind. He called Broadcast About as near as I get to a love poem. Its not, Im afraid, very near. And his relationship with Maeve did indeed depend on him not getting too near. He seems to be signalling this somehow in what he says about it. What most excites the poet is their separation; she in the concert hall hearing the music, he listening to the radio picturing her latest face in his mind. The orchestras chords overpower his mind, not through their sound but by being distant by being distant. Remote things seem desirable. Her hands in the concert hall, tiny in all that air, applauding, come to him on the air through his radio, not the real untidy air of bargains, suffering and love but metaphorical electronic air, much more exciting. The contrast with Talking in Bed is stark. In that poem a unique distance from isolation, he means closeness obviously but he expresses it by using the word distance which, of course, is extremely eloquent and tragic. But there the closeness of this extreme distance from isolation made communication all but impossible. Here the distance between the lovers imparts a delicate bloom to the relationship.

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Three years later in 1964 Philip wrote to Maeve while lying in bed, the night before he was to join Monica in the retreat in Northumberland which shed bought for herself. Writing in bed ought to be easiest, this is to Maeve Writing in bed ought to be easiest. Its just midnight and Im scribbling a note to you because if I dont heaven knows when I shall. I go up to Hexham tomorrow as you. I shall hope to be agreeable to Monica and not to make the visit a disappointment but one can never be sure how one will behave. Talking to Monica in bed in close proximity was an ordeal, writing to Maeve in bed at a distance is an unalloyed pressure. It seems astonishing, cruel even, that Philip should so lightly refer in a letter to Maeve to a bleak love poem so intimately associated with Monica. But Larkins is a profoundly literary imagination. The perfection of the poems art had already made it common cultural currency and he quotes himself just as he would quote a familiar tag from Byrom or from Auden. Chilling witness, perhaps, to the icy dispassion of the poets choice of art over life. Though Philips and Maeves feelings for each other were very sensual - and as Jean has said n a recent paper, he told her that she drew the line at premarital sex but God knows, we do almost everything else there still was the essential difference and this was crucial I think and its what kept the relationship going. It was not until two decades after their first meeting in the mid seventies, as Maeve told Andrew Motion, she finally yielded to temptation, adding But only on very rare and isolated occasions and at a cost of grave violation to my conscious since I never in principle abandoned my stand on pre-marital sex.

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By this time, one might suspect, that by pre-martial sex Maeve really means pre-mortality sex actually. At about this same time the poet discovered, or created, a third muse, the most interesting of the lot in many ways. Betty Mackereth had become his secretary in 1957, two years after his arrival in Hull. So theyd seen a lot of each other over the years and hed come to rely on her for support and advice. By 1962, his fortieth year, he told Robert Conquest I have simplified my grub down to the chopped cabbage, grated carrot, cheese with egg, raw, and Worcestershire sauce on the side with milk and wholemeal bread and butter. This is at the instigation of my secretary whos certainly never ill and is full of energy. Unfortunately she says itll be two years before the poison is worked out of my system. As the years went by Betty, never ill and full of energy, came to seem a force of nature to Philip. She represented the Lawrencian life force which had so awed him in earlier life. WB Yeats, in his final years, was famously injected with monkey juice, testosterone, in order to restore his libido and his zest for life and it worked. Larkins strategy was as effective but less mechanical than Yeatss. At the age of 52, in the summer of 1975, with a mix of motives from life and from art, he began an affair with Betty. To the casual observer this might seem a familiar story, the boss taking advantage of his secretary in a sexual relationship free from the complications presented by Monica and by Maeve. But Larkin had the deeper motive of the artist. The relationship was to give him the opportunity to write love poetry again which hed not had any occasion to do for over a decade. It

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was the only way he would ever do it again which I think must be a motive. From this affair with Betty Larkin spun his most original reinterpretation of the muse relationship. This muse is no distant beauty. She is physically accessible, an intimate friend even. What gives her her inaccessibility is her vitality, her conviction of longevity. And in this respect shes as far off as any perfect Beatrice or Laura. The relationship is dramatised in the little known poem We Met at the End of the Party, a really great work which will ultimately become one of his well known late works. We met at the end of the party when most of the drinks were dead and all the glasses dirty. Have this thats left, you said. We walked through the last of summer when shadows reached long and blue across days that were growing shorter. You said Theres autumn too. Always for you whats finished is nothing and what survives cancels the failed, the famished, as if we had fresh lives from that night on and just living could make me unaware of June and the guests arriving and I not there. The anapaestic da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum meter is suited to companionable intimacy - its a peculiarly ambiguous poem - but the imagery is powerful symbolic. The poet and his lover encounter each other at the end of the party of life, one of Larkins most resonant metonyms. She encourages him to make the best of what remains but, always the aesthete, he is unable to enjoy this spoiled, dirty remnant of his life. The precious moment of insipience has gone and what remains is not good enough.

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Hes baffled by her cheerful ability to live in the present as though we had fresh lives while he remains lost in the past imagining the guests still arriving in June for the party of his life while he somehow out of time, decades later, in Autumn cannot find his way back to meet them. Betty recalls the real life debates between them which this poem distils. He said to me My father died when he was 63. I mean he was miserable, And I expect I shall die when Im 63. And I said Yes you will, because youre programming yourself to die at 63. Larkin, of course, did die at the age of 63 of the same disease as his father. Though he criticised Plath for living out a pre-determined self-destructive myth in her work, in his own quiet way Larkin perhaps did follow her example. Betty, now in her eighties, plays bridge regularly and has only recently given up her golf engagements. The lyric spark of Larkins art flickered out 30 or more years ago, the unfailing vigour of his muses life still continues. But, as I suggested at the beginning, there is a second simpler version of the artists abnormal life. In this version art neither imitates nor is intimated by life. Life drops out of the equation altogether. In a pugnacious early letter the undergraduate Larkin quoted Walter Paters famous slogan Do you hear any disparaging talk about arts for arts sake? It annoys me. Hes very young isnt he? It annoys me. For what other sake can art possibly be undertaken? Let them tell me that. On perhaps the most profound level Larkins life is always quite irrelevant to his art. Though he needed to live in order to produce 19

his poetry, the poetry exists for its own sake, growing and developing according to its own internal, formal principles. At the beginning of October 1944, a few days after completing his first volume of poetry, The North Ship, which he later condemned as mere juvenilia, Larkin began to write his drafts in a hardbound manuscript workbook, the first of a series of eight in which, over the next 35 years, he composed virtually his entire mature oeuvre. He wrote in soft pencil, working on one stanza at a time and dated it piece when it was complete. Extraordinarily methodical. In hindsight it seems that the initiation of this first workbook marks the beginning of his deliberate construction of an oeuvre. From 1945 onwards a strict internal discipline, absent in his earlier juvenilia, governs all the elements of his writing. In a late interview he concluded that his attempts at novel writing in the later 1940s had failed because hed taken too poet an approach. They were oversized poems. They were certainly written with intense care for detail. If one word was used on page 15 I didnt reuse it on page 115. This is the principle which governs his poetry. Uncanny and implausible though it may seem, he waits for the right time to use a particular word, weighing whether its time has come, and once its been expended he never uses it again. The same applies to rhymes, forms and genres. Larkins oeuvre does not consist, as does that of most poets, of numerous overlapping works on similar themes and with similar forms. And when I wrote my first book on Larkin I found this, I thought Oh Ill find another poem like Deceptions or Ill find

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another poem like Absences. And I never could, there was only one like that one. And everyone whos tried to write on him will have found this. Every poem is quite different from every other poem. As he put it in an extraordinary metaphor Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique and need never be done again. Each poem is its own sole freshly-created universe and by the end his oeuvre makes a complete set. RJC Watt, in his extremely useful concordance to the 1988 collected poems, lists the frequency of occurrence of all the individual words that Larkin uses. One startling statistic is the large number which occur once and once only. And I think if you did the math youd find that this is unusual, theres more of this in Larkin than anyone else. It may seem unremarkable in the case of out of the way archaisms, vulgarisms or poeticisms, undeciduous, Kodak distant, blent, almost instinct, [blaut :32:12], rat bags, luminously peopled, immensements. Supposed to be the poet of plain, ordinary, language. No way. Readers familiar with Larkins poetry will easily identify the works in which such hundred watt or five hundred watts as unmolesting, blazen, unpriceable, natureless and unmmendably occur. Many of you will , I hope, be already putting the poems to the words. One wouldnt expect to encounter these words again in an oeuvre. But the principle also applies to quite ordinary forty watt or sixty watt words which give out a poetic-like, quite out of proportion to their intrinsic power. 21

Unsatisfactory, for instance, makes four appearances in his mature work, all in the same poem, Reference back. After using the word here Larkin knew better than to dilute its impact by ever using it again. Wonderful appears only in Reasons for Attendance, The wonderful feel of girls. Once he had made that phrase with the word wonderful in hes not going to use it again because youd remember the other one and it would spoil it. Its true, believe me. He uses swerving three times in the opening of Here and never again. A wardrobe, of course, occurs only in Aubade, welcome occurs only in The Importance of Elsewhere. And one could go on and find a lot more. Obviously some common words, crucial words he has to use several times but even then hes very economical about the way he does it. As weve seen, many of Larkins poems feature attics of one kind or another but the word attic occurs only twice in his published oeuvre, once to describe the rapists disappointment in Deceptions, As he bursts into fulfilments desolate attic; once to indicate the poets sublime awe at the unpeopled sea in Absences, Such attics cleared of me! Such absences! The attic of Deceptions is squalid and humiliating, the attics of Absences are awesome and exhilarating. Larkin ensures that the two appearances of the word in his work, one singular and the other plural, mark the furthest ends of the spectrum of emotion which the concept possessed for him. Both poems were written in 1950 and he never uses the word again. Although he talks about attics in poem after poem after poem he never uses the word.

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He did use attic in one more, in a lovely phrase, An emaciate attic in Unfinished Poem where he talks about lying in a bedroom at the top of a house listening to death in the streets below wreaking its havoc and holding himself in and waiting and then death finally comes up the stair at the end. But it wasnt quite up to speed and I think for that reason I mean its a good poem he didnt publish it, and I think the reason why was because it would have spoiled the word. And what told him? What was it? What uncanny instinct was it that told him, although he was writing aubades fairly regularly throughout his career, to keep the word back as the title of a poem until he finally got to the one where he could really use it in the proper way? Something must have told him because he could have used in the late 1940s and 50s and he never did. On one single occasion, thoughtfully providing the exception that proves the rule, Larkin breaks his principle by repeating himself. Afresh appears three times alongside unresting in his Celebration of Continuing Life; The Trees. Yet still the unresting castles thresh in full grown thickness every May. Last year they seem to say, begin afresh, afresh, afresh. Then in deliberate self-quotation the words recur in his final selfelegy Aubade where the poets terror of unresting death flashes afresh to hold and horrify. Its an effect which gets a real kick out of the fact that you know he means you to remember The Trees and he knows you will remember The Trees because he knows hes written so well that The Trees is now a permanent part of the canon and so you will remember it. Thats what great poets can do. Shakespeare is the same and very few poets can do that.

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Every formal aspect of Larkins work shows the same principle of economy. Every poem, for instance, has its own unique unrepeated flavour of rhyme. There are 17 unrhymed poems - Ill go a bit quickly here, get the impression, its interesting each one has a different kind of crimelessness. The line endings and youll always know when the line endings come in Larkin even if the poem doesnt rhyme, hes not like Hughes or Heaney where you cant tell, you know, might as well be prose if you just listen to it, youve got to see it on the page before you know where on earth where the line endings come, you always know in Larkin where they are. If you listen to where they are in the unrhymed poems, just listen Afternoons, flowing polysyllables and open vowels, fading, twos, bordering, ground, afternoons, assemble. In the pagan hymn [Solar 0:348:25] the unrhymed line endings are rigorously impersonal and austere; you, distance, origin, flames, exploding, your, gold, horizontals. In the Hedgehog poem, The Mower, the lines end of disconsolate monosyllables as if the denial of rhyme were a deliberately imposed penance; world, help, not, absence, careful, kind, time. You dont need to quote the poem, just the rhymes will do. Theyre not rhymes, theyre just the unrhymed endings of the lines will do it. At the opposite end of the spectrum Larkins perfect rhymes range from the flat ordinariness of Mr Bleaney, stayed, til, frayed, sill, land, took, hand, hook, through the snappier doggerel of the shorter line, This Be The Verse, dad, do, had, you, and the cynical couplets of Money in which sex rhymes with cheques and wife with life, to the full-throated open vowels of The Trees reinforced by rich alliteration and an ornamental rhyme scheme, A-

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B-B-A rather than A-B-A-B. Leaf, said, spread, grief, again, too, new, grain, fresh, may, say, afresh. Then [?? 0:49:37] or para-rhyme, subtly beautiful, home, come, stands, ascends or queasily discordant, glass, face, share, shear, failure, regalia. Thats a lovely one, failure, regalia. There are multiple rhymes or half-rhymes, either musical thicken, quicken, distance, existence, hollows, follows, shallows. Or comic, touchstone, much tone, breakthroughs, cake queues. Finally there are Larkins trademark bad rhymes in that riot of misrhyme Toads poison rhymes with proportion, lanes with sardines, bucket with like it, pension with made on, toad like preposterously with hard luck, blarney with money and other slyly with either. Thats the best one of all actually, other rhyming with either. Most genres appear only once. Theres a single morning elegy in April Sunday Brings The Snow, a single animal elegy, The Mower, a single meditative graveyard elegy Churchgoing, a single extended narrative poem, The Dance, and so on and so on. Genres which recur adopt a new form of voice on every occasion. The ecstatic female aubade Wedding Wind is answered, as weve seen, by the grim, masculine anti-aubade At the Chiming of Light Upon Sleep and the style of each is totally different, he uses different vocabulary, you know, it becomes apocalyptic in the second poem for a moment which, of course, he usually doesnt. The tragic Deceptions is recast as the comic If My Darling, both dramatic monologues spoken by self-critical males apologising to innocent women.

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In 1961 he wrote Naturally the Foundation will Bear your Expenses in the blithe voice of a British academic freeloader on a freebie. Seven years later in Posterity he adopted the voice of a dissatisfied American academic unable to reconcile work and family pressures as he grinds away at his biography of the old fart Philip Larkin. If one traces the key genre of epithalamium - wedding celebration, through Larkins work, one finds every possible variation of angle and style. Wedding Wind, To My Wife, Long Roots, More Summer, To Our Side of Earth, Maiden Name, The Whitsun Weddings, The Dance and so on and so on. Larkins collected poets then reveal a poet over three decades carefully deploying his thesaurus of words and his repertoire of forms and genres in the most telling way possible. This is why an oeuvre of only 112 published works 176 including the unpublished works which Thwaite in 1988 seem so substantial and also why so many poems are so memorable and so quotable. Larkins mature volumes contain, it has been said, a remarkable percentage of the definitive poems of his time. This is because he aimed to make his version of any theme or genre, even his take on any particular word, definitive. You hear the word or the phrase, but the word sometimes, and you get it whole, everything and you realise hes copyrighted it and whenever you use the word - its a bit irritating sometimes - you know, you cant say ordinary words. You know, They fuck you up, your mum and dad, you know, how many people have said that, you know? Now when you say it youre quoting Larkin but you werent quoting Larkin before he wrote it but plenty of people said it. There you are. 26

Its this organic, artistic ontogeny which explains why he was so certain that by the time he reached Aubade in 1977 his life was over. In literal terms this was his Inner Funk About Death poem, in artistic terms, as he put it, it marked the death of a talent. His artistic life had been perfected. He lived on another eight years, depressed and miserable, but his poetry was complete so what was the point? At the end of his life he told Andrew Motion I used to believe that I should perfect the work and life could fuck itself. Now Im not doing anything and all Ive got is a fucked up life. There is tragedy and perhaps nobility here. Open-eyed Larkin chose perfection of the work over perfection of the life and so inevitably ended his days raging in the dark. Thank you.

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