My first encounter with Larkin was “This be the verse” which is at this point iconic in my opinion, but the one that resonated with me the most is perhaps not as well known: “I remember, I remember”.
I read it soon after having moved for work to the other side of the world and struggling with why I felt so empty. There’s many things to say about the poem, not least the for me very relatable disgust for your home town, but the final line hit me like a train when I read it:
‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’
I remember feeling like an idiot. Of course I felt empty. What did I expect, that my life and me as a person would change just because I moved somewhere else?
Others have interpreted this line cynically, but I don’t, except perhaps in a strict optimistically cynical way: you have the same capability of winning or failing, feeling good or bad, feeling included or excluded, anywhere.
As the line right before it says: I suppose it’s not the place’s fault.
You need to be able to appreciate bleakness if you hope to enjoy Larkin. My favorite of his poems is Mr Bleaney, in which the speaker rents a cheap and depressing room and wonders if his predecessor (Mr Bleaney) thought about what ending up in such a room reveals about the life choices and character of the renter (with the implication that the speaker is asking himself the same question).
Larkin packs a lot of bleakness into those 28 lines - highly recommended!
If you enjoy the bleakness of Larkin, I suggest reading John Cheever's journals. They've always felt to me like the Larkin-voice for the middle class of the same generation, in the USA.
Larkin is a poet who "comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable." I often return to his poem Aubade [0], in particular the idea that "death is no different whined at than withstood," and that in the meantime, "work has to be done." Chop wood, carry water.
“I have never found Larkin an easy poet to like…”.
On the contrary, I’ve always loved him since I first read “Toads” in Sound and Sense, a poetry anthology, in high school. I didn’t understand all of it, but it felt close, maybe because something toad-like squatted in me, too. (Which was true, after nearly forty years from that encounter, I still haven’t been able to say “Stuff your pension”!) He has a follow up to this poem, “Toads Revisited” that I don’t like that much.
This is an interesting claim. I have not found lack of trust to be all that central to his work. I just had a flip through my copy of the Collected Poems, and none of the 30 or so bookmarked favourites feature trust.
I would say that at the core, tying the various themes(sex, death, failure, general human misery) together are the sentiments of resignation, and resentment. The kind of resentment that grows out of powerlessness, and inevitability.
Thank you! I’ll have to reread his work. I really love Larkin.
What you’re describing “sex, death, failure, general human misery, fueled by resentment grown out of powerlessness and inevitability” makes me think of Evelyn Waugh.
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.
Oh! I don’t know how to say this without sounding super geeky:
I didn’t know before this article Larkin the poet. The only association I had with the name is that it was one of the names for a non-player character in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign (Critical Role, season 1x71)
Now that might be just a coincidence, and maybe it is. The interesting thing is that the lack of trust was a central theme of that character. (The players didn’t trust her, the character was actively betraying the trust of her compatriots, she had a different alias indicating that she is the Deceiver.)
I’m wondering if maybe the association unconsciously affected the name choice of the dungeons master.
Larkin is like Shakespeare a core of English Literature education in the UK - most people in the UK will be intimately familiar with his work therefore.
But not so likely with the upcoming generation. The GCSE (a vital qualifying exam in the UK taken at more or less the US 10th grade level) syllabus has now been adjusted not to include Philip Larkin or Wilfrid Owen in a 'diversity drive'. Fair enough because not all great writers can be included in a crowded syllabus. I don't know who the replacement authors are but trust that they are of equivalent merit.
Some really fantastic stuff on the new curriculum by the likes of Fatimah Asghar, Zaffar Kunial and Ilya Kaminsky!
I'm sure Larkin was a great addition in his day, with a much more contemporary style of writing than a lot of the older poetry that had the standard stuff before. Probably turned a lot of kids onto poetry who would have otherwise yawned at it. I'm hopeful that these new updates will have the same effect and have a lot more resonance with the younger generations.
Agree with yourself that it's a pity to lose people like Larkin and Heaney but the replacements are very exciting indeed and those old names are so, so big that anyone who develops even a passing interest in poetry will surely run across them quickly.
How could you possibly call what Asghar writes poetry? It’s like someone was genuinely trying to prove that free verse means nothing. It’s ok as prose, in parts.
Zaffar Kunial likewise doesn’t pay any visible attention to rhythm or metre or anything that might make what be writes poetry but at least he can write some evocative prose.
Thank you. I needed that reminder of why no one cares about modern poetry. I do feel sad for the students who will be deprived of the chance to be exposed to poetry in the poetry section of their literature studies but all things pass.
This is a very charged comment about very subjective things so I don't want to get into it too deeply.
I'm not sure what you mean that no one has been of any importance since Ginsberg as that's absolutely not true. Heaney himself was in the generation after that, and there's been plenty since, Paul Muldoon, John Ashbury, Leontia Flynn, Ciaran Carson, Meadbh McGuckin, Sophie Collins, Dan Paterson, honestly the list goes on and on. These people have been hugely important in my life and in the lives of many people around me.
People absolutely care about modern poetry and magazines like the Paris Review are in very high circulation. Beyond the confines of traditional print media I also see more and more people in the younger generation using platforms like Instagram to share original poetry. Sam Riviere is particularly notably there for having published his books first via Tumblr before they were collected and printed by Faber.
I can sympathise with the idea that these poets might not be to your personal taste but to write whole generations off as unimportant because of that is a very self centered outlook.
With regards to the poets on the new curriculum I personally find them very exciting and I think there's something to be said for kids being exposed to verse beyond rhyming iambic pentemeter written by people who look like them or come from less dominant cultural backgrounds like they themselves might do.
Of course it’s a charged comment. They’re putting prose with arbitrary line breaks on the poetry curriculum. People who like poetry, a medium that is meant to sound good, or at least interesting, in some way, shape or form rhythmic, will be disappointed.
Of the modern poets you mentioned I may have heard the name of Paul Muldoon before. That is the hardly the height of cultural influence. Modern poetry is read by two kinds of people, those forced to do so in school and those who would like to do an MFA. Even short story writing is in better health and of more cultural significance. When poetry was of cultural significance working class people would have heard of them, people who did not go out of their way to keep up. Allan Ginsberg was genuinely famous, known, recognised. Paris Review is like the New Yorker, consumed by people of a certain social class, and of certain tastes within it. Every poet you mentioned combined has less cultural cachet than Weezer or Ed Sheeran.
I’m not saying they’re unimportant. Much as Brutalism is a part of modernism, a culturally important movement, faux poetry is also important. Important doesn’t mean good.
I’m happy that you enjoy the thought of people of the right cultural background being foregrounded. At least some people will enjoy the thought of the new curriculum.
For the record there’s an awful lot of good poetry in English that doesn’t follow iambic pentameter but does pay attention to sound. You may find the examples in this link educational.
I might find them educational? I found my masters degree in jpoetry pretty educational.
Have you heard of Maya Angelou? She's pretty important, maybe you might learn something if you check out her work.
I think it's short sighted to write off someone's work as being "prose with arbitrary line breaks" after what seems like only a cursory glance at their work. Their popularity and recognition by the governing bodies of British schools might suggest there's something you're missing. If you really think they're writing without any attention to the sound of their words then I don't know what I can say to you.
I don't know why we need to compare Ciaran Carson to Ed Sheeran either. Culture shouldn't be a competition for numbers.
Honestly the former's writing on the Troubles is phenomenal. I don't see what it matters what "class of people" read his work. As a working class person who grew up in a conflict zone myself nothing else has ever captured my lived experience like Belfast Confetti for example. It almost feels personally offensive to have you write that off as "unimportant."
Like I say, I don't want to get into this as it doesn't feel productive or like I could possibly say anything to encourage you to look at things differently.
Edit: By the way, you did say they were inimportant. You said there had been no important poet writing in English since Ginsberg. What class of people are reading Ginsberg anyway?
If you think iambic pentameter is the beginning and end of poetry in English before free verse conquered all either your Master’s was narrowly focused or your defense of modern poetry could be improved.
As to Maya Angelou, she does seem to be writing poetry and some of it is ok so that places her head and shoulders above any of the writers you mentioned in your first post on the new GCSEs. Obviously she’s far more famous for her novels, but then again they’re unambiguously good.
If someone thinks the governing body of British schools has no taste then their respect will not especially impress. If it is possible to read poetry aloud and even consider that the author didn’t care how it sounded it’s not much good as poetry.
Ginsberg and Heaney were household names. People who weren’t forced to know who they were at least knew of them. Instead of Ed Sheeran think of Sally Rooney, if that makes the point clearer. If you read the Irish Times or listen to Irish radio or watch Irish TV you know Sally Rooney exists. She’s important in the cultural conversation. None of the poets you mentioned have a tenth of her cachet. Poetry as a popular art is dead because modern poetry is so unappealing.
Being irrelevant to the cultural conversation is how modern poetry is unimportant. Most people who love and care about and read literature don’t read modern poetry because it’s authors have no interest in popular appeal. They want to appeal to the kind of people who award teaching positions at Queen’s because they certainly aren’t going to make a living writing poetry.
I used to think this was inevitable, that poetry was doomed because of TV, radio, recorded music, but Arabic and Chinese have important, popular poets. Normal people know and care about poetry. So it’s not that poetry in English was doomed to irrelevance, it just disappeared up its own arse.
Important, meaning of wide cultural relevance and impact. In the US, Ginsberg was the last poet an ordinary person might have been expected to know existed, the last household name.
As a gesture of good will if you want email me the names of 30 modern poems you think are excellent and I’ll do a close analysis of five of them, like I’d get my students to do. I will give far more than cursory attention to all of them.
Some time ago I was at Barnes & Noble with my sister, and I had a look at the poetry section. I was dismayed that, after all these years, the modernist poets still have a stranglehold on the Muses, with their sad, clammy, modernist hands. As if e.e. cummings were a poet merely because his typewriter lacked a shift key, or T.S. Eliot merely because he mistook the carriage return for punctuation. A wasteland indeed! Surely thine eternal soul shall forever suffer hellfire for thy r.h. Sin. Poetry, poetry… “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
half the time if
it’s not got
random line breaks
or indentation
then
people don’t
consider it
poetry
but if it does then
that is enough
and as for the other half—or so very nearly half, like a pie whose pieces have all been eaten but whose dish yet contains stale morsels broken off by the very act of dividing the pie, remnants too small to be considered worthy of taking by any prospective eater now dried by the chill Winter atmosphere and the pale rays of a Spring Sun not yet arrived—any prose bearing any recognizable characteristic of poetry whatsoever, any prose perceived to be elevated on high—how high exactly I cannot say, perhaps as high as the throne of a king or the perch of a songbird or the very heavens hereon—and clothed in raiment of purplish hue—how purple I cannot say, perhaps as purple as the robe of a king or the fletch of a songbird or the very heavens at dawn—but it is this high and purply prose that this half deems poetry.
It reeks of, I realize, elitistry and snobbistry,
but it is, in reality, good ol’-fashioned honestry.
We get such pretension, ostentation shoved down our thirsty throats,
dawn to dusk by marketing and adverts, and PR’s brazen boasts,
that oft I find it stifling, the stench of stagnant shit and piss;
and so to whiff a fresher air, I call it what it is.
Every god and reader knows
there’s nothing wrong with prose,
yet a sentence broken in the midst is
poetic only from a distance;
and have it ne’er a music, metre, rhyme:
your “poem” isn’t worth my time.
I'm not so optimistic about Larkin's replacements, whoever they are. I'm not British but it makes me sad to think that young people won't be shown "The Whitsun Weddings."
Interesting. I'm in the UK and was never shown any Larkin, as far as I know (I'm mid 50s). Neither of my daughters did Larkin (just finished secondary).
Same age (ish) here. I would have killed for the chance to read Larkin, or any 20th century poet, as part of the English syllabus. Instead I got to spend many, many hours grappling with Chaucer: A povre wydwe, somdeel stape in age, / Was whilom dwellyng in a narwe cotage, / Biside a grove, stondynge in a dale ...
Same here. It's not all bad though, I think a lot of Larkin's poetry can best be appreciated when you have a few years behind you and have had some of the same experiences as him.
For anyone looking to explore poetry a bit further, I did create an app for this purpose. The design, development and curation of the app is all done by me. It’s a react native app which I actually find hugely rewarding to work on (it provides me with a sense of purpose that my day job lacks).
Anyway, exploring poetry has been fascinating and I truly urge anyone to do so if they have an interest in it. It’s never time wasted.
