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The Less Deceived

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Bradford, Richard. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 2005. Larkin stopped writing poetry shortly after his collection High Windowswas published in 1974. In an Observerobituary, Kingsley Amis characterized the poet as “a man much driven in upon himself, with increasing deafness from early middle age cruelly emphasizing his seclusion.” Small though it is, Larkin’s body of work has “altered our awareness of poetry’s capacity to reflect the contemporary world,” according to London Magazinecorrespondent Roger Garfitt. A.N. Wilson drew a similar conclusion in the Spectator:“Perhaps the reason Larkin made such a great name from so small an oeuvrewas that he so exactly caught the mood of so many of us… Larkin found the perfect voice for expressing our worst fears.” That voice was “stubbornly indigenous,” according to Robert B. Shawin Poetry Nation.Larkin appealed primarily to the British sensibility; he remained unencumbered by any compunction to universalize his poems by adopting a less regional idiom. Perhaps as a consequence, his poetry sells remarkably well in Great Britain, his readers come from all walks of life, and his untimely cancer-related death in 1985 has not diminished his popularity. Andrew Sullivan feels that Larkin “has spoken to the English in a language they can readily understand of the profound self-doubt that this century has given them. He was, of all English poets, a laureate too obvious to need official recognition.” The birdsong makes him feel ‘like a child/ Who comes on a scene/ Of adult reconciling/ And can understand nothing/ But the unusual laughter/ And starts to be happy.’ My favorite poem in this collection, I think, is the seemingly slight lyric "Coming." Larkin is the kind of poet who bares his soul not directly, but indirectly, in ostensibly offhand remarks and sidelong glances. Rather than straightforwardly asserting, "Childhood, to me, is a forgotten boredom," he starts a sentence in this way: "I, whose childhood is a forgotten boredom,..." The effect is all the more piercing: we, the readers, are so blindsided that we swallow Larkin's bombshell of a confession whole. We think, "How refreshing it is to hear a post-Wordsworth poet say that childhood to him is a forgotten boredom!" And this is why the ending of the poem works as well as it does: it startles us to discover that this poet, who found his childhood to be boring and forgettable, is nevertheless able to describe childhood's emotions with such heartfelt and unadorned precision. (In fact, the poem's ending startles us in exactly the same way that springtime startles the poem's speaker; the poem enacts what it is describing.)

This was a post-war Britain that had lost its Empire, so Larkin’s The Less Deceived almost reflected a sense of living in an isolated motherland. Indeed, Philip Larkin was a man ambling through life with a ponderous glare, capturing the foibles of modern life through a discerning lens and an overwhelming sense that one’s senses were diminishing. “Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles,” he describes the inside of his mind in If My Darling, “Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate.” Philip Larkin said on more than one occasion that his discovery of Thomas Hardy's poetry was a turning point in the writing of his own poetry: "I don't think Hardy, as a poet, is a poet for young people. I know it sounds ridiculous to say I wasn't young at twenty-five or twenty-six, but at least I was beginning to find out what life was about, and that's precisely what I found in Hardy. In other words, I'm saying that what I like about him primarily is his temperament and the way he sees life. He's not a transcendental writer, he's not a Yeats, he's not an Eliot; his subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love... Arguably Larkin’s most seminal poetic work, The Less Deceived was a collection of 29 poems released in 1955 which marked a sea change in his evolution towards becoming the literary colossus he is regarded today. Belonging to a (then) new generation of Angry Young Man writers, Larkin established his own unique voice—cynical yet lyrical, pessimistic yet profound—with an almost effortlessly ingenious ability to reflect the times he was living in. Larkin's commentary and observations about aging and disappointment and the fears and uncertainties that keep us trapped in conformity despite our wishes for freedom, or desire to get the girl, or hopes (in vain) to evade the disappointment that successive looks in the mirror yield over time--frequently have a (gut) punch line. It's as he said himself, in the aptly named poem entitled

How could I have neglected this great poet for so long? After all, I have an abiding love for 20th century verse, and I remember encountering—and admiring—that masterpiece of his, “Church Going,” more than two decades ago. The list of poems by Philip Larkin come mostly from the four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime: [1] [2] His first collection (The North Ship) seems to me more ‘romantic’, but also more prosaic. The Less Deceived then seems to find Larkin a little more worldly, bitter, and rejected (though not always), but it’s entirely more interesting, beautiful, and sharp as a result. The Whitsun Weddings continues on this trajectory and is similarly excellent. If Rudyard Kipling’s ( 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) is the poetry of empire, then Philip Larkin’s is the poetry of the aftermath of empire. Having lived through the divestiture of England’s various colonial holdings, the economic impact of empire building having finally come home, together with the ultimate travesty of imperial pretensions and the nightmare of Nazi and Soviet colonization in Europe, Larkin was wary of the expansiveness, the acquisitiveness, and the grandeur implicit in the imperial mentality. Many features of his poetry can be traced to that wariness: from the skepticism and irony, to the colloquial diction, to the formal precision of his poems. I don’t believe that only a woman can write a woman’s biography, something Sutherland modishly worries about in an afterword (in mitigation for a crime he hasn’t committed, he tells us that he showed his manuscript to feminists such as Jane Miller and Rosie Boycott). It’s possible that a female biographer might have been less timid here, or more empathic, but it’s not certain. Jones is hardly the first clever, beautiful female to have been brought to abjection like this, to have embraced, even to have exalted, such a state as her lot: think of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But women, too, tend to balk at the idea of examining forensically the notion that love sometimes bends us out of shape. The truths involved are too agonising and shameful.

Larkin can at times be mordantly humorous. In “If My Darling” he speculates about what his girl might think if she could view the vile contents of his mind (“monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles/ Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate”), in “Toad” he compares his day-job to an intrusive amphibian (“why should I let the toad work squat on my life?), and in “I Remember, I Remember,” he excuses Coventry, the town he lived in for the painfully uneventful first eighteen years of his life, from any specific responsibility (“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”)His irony, in this poem as in so many, is used defensively; he wards off criticism by beating everyone to the punch. Irony is in some respects safer than laying oneself open for inspection. In many of his finest poems, however, he drops his guard and allows himself to think seriously about serious subjects. The foremost example in The Less Deceived is “Church Going.” The title turns out to be marvelously ambiguous, appearing at first blush to be a mere reference to attending church, but then becoming, as the poem progresses, an elliptical, punning reference to churches going out of fashion. Throughout his life, England was Larkin’s emotional territory to an eccentric degree. The poet distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry. He also tried to avoid the cliches of his own culture, such as the tendency to read portent into an artist’s childhood. In his poetry and essays, Larkin remembered his early years as “unspent” and “boring,” as he grew up the son of a city treasurer in Coventry. Poor eyesight and stuttering plagued Larkin as a youth; he retreated into solitude, read widely, and began to write poetry as a nightly routine. In 1940 he enrolled at Oxford, beginning “a vital stage in his personal and literary development,” according to Bruce K. Martin in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.At Oxford Larkin studied English literature and cultivated the friendship of those who shared his special interests, including Kingsley Amis and John Wain. He graduated with first class honors in 1943, and, having to account for himself with the wartime Ministry of Labor, he took a position as librarian in the small Shropshire town of Wellington. While there he wrote both of his novels as well as The North Ship,his first volume of poetry. After working at several other university libraries, Larkin moved to Hull in 1955 and began a 30-year association with the library at the University of Hull. He is still admired for his expansion and modernization of that facility.

The narrator then uses the incident as a starting point from which to launch into a melancholy philosophic meditation on the nature of art, love, death, eternity, etc. I know that what is really important is if I (the reader) enjoy what I read and not necessarily what the literature professors think of something but I still can't help feeling like an intellectual simpleton whenever I approach poetry. Mary M. Macdermott, Vowel Sounds in Poetry: Their Music and Tone-Colour (unpublished Ph. D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 1941 ) vol. 1, pp. 17–18. But even though he cannot believe in God himself, if the churches fell entirely into disuse it would represent a victory for forces he does not precisely define, yet is clearly suspicious of. And a ‘serious house on serious earth’ (as Larkin calls the church) can never be truly obsolete. Lines 52-54: “For, though I've no idea / What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, / It pleases me to stand in silence here;”Keith Sagar, ‘Church Going’ and ‘Wedding-Wind’, in Criticism in Action, ed. Maurice Hussey (London, 1969) p. 126. The poem comprises nine stanzas of five lines each. The rhyme scheme follows the pattern ABBAB in each. There are ten syllables per line, with the exception of line four of each stanza which has eight or nine syllables. There is a rhythmic energy about the poem despite its sad tone of lost past and elusive memories. The first two stanzas examine the ways the building in which the speaker sits resembles so many other modern buildings—high-rise hotels, airport lounges—although there is something disturbingly unlike them, as well. Not until the end of the second stanza does he reveal that it is a hospital. What unites people here is the common knowledge of their own mortality; even if they are not to die immediately, they are forced by the place to confront the fact that they will die eventually. The inescapability of that knowledge tames and calms the people in the building, as once the knowledge of death and its aftermath quieted them in church.

The early work of an important poet always has a potential interest, since it is likely to contain anticipations of his later, finer poems; in Larkin's case, however, this interest is limited because of the sharp break in his writing after The North Ship. Larkin is often described as ‘anti-Modernist’, but some of his poems could also be called ‘anti-Romantic’, e.g. I Remember, I Remember, where he recalls the place he grew up in, where he ‘wasn’t spoken to by an old hat’; and yet there is no bitterness against the place where his childhood was ‘unspent’, for that bitterness would itself be a form of romanticism. Larkin can be romantic too, yet it is always a desperate romanticism, infected with loss. Perhaps the most moving poems in this collection are the three (“Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album,” “Maiden Name,” and “Latest Face”) which he wrote for Winifred Arnott, a friend from his Belfast days who married someone else. I particularly love the conclusion to “Photograph Album”:Larkin arrived at his conclusions candidly, concerned to expose evasions so that the reader might stand “naked but honest, ‘less deceived’ ... before the realities of life and death,” to quote King. Larkin himself offered a rather wry description of his accomplishments—an assessment that, despite its levity, links him emotionally to his work. In 1979 he told the Observer:“I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any… Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” And since it is now four minutes into Valentines Day, I'll cut and paste a poem from this book that I think is sort of tangentially appropriate for this day of consumerist romance and love (as in it's not about consumerist love, nor really about love at all, but has a certain nice bitterness that I think is relevant (you can also listen to this song, which I was hoping to find a non-live version of, but it's still pretty listenable).

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