Collected Poems. - book reviews

National Review, June 2, 1989 by Thomas Fleming

THE POEM," wrote Philip Larkin in 1977, "or the kind of poem we write nowadays, is a single emotional spearpoint, a concentrated effect that is achieved by leaving out everything but the emotion itself." A reader going through Larkin's collected poems in chronological order (which in this edition means starting in the back) will soon discover that Larkin's development as a poet is indeed a matter of progressively "leaving out everything but the emotion itself"

His early work-which includes all of the poems published in The North Ship (1945) and many of those published in The Less Deceived (1955) as well as the juvenilialacks the distinctive Larkin touch: the mixture of compassion and nastiness, obscenity and high seriousness, despairing selfpity and stoic resignation. Above all, his early work-like the least successful of his later poemsfails to achieve the powerful concentration he displays in "Annus Mirabilis"

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles' first LP

-or in "Aubade," published in the TLS in 1977 and appearing only now for the first time in a collection:

This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die And specious stuff that says

No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel,

not seeing That this is what we fear-no sight,

no sound, No touch or taste or smelt nothing to

think with, Nothing to love or Unk with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round

At the time of his death, in 1985, Larkin was probably the best-loved poet writing English. This may be no great accomplishment in a period when Ted Hughes is poet laureate of Britain and John Ashbery the most-decorated poet in the United States. Still, Larkin shares a certain common touch with earlier poets who have achieved great popularity-Kipling, Whitman (if he counts as a poet), and the greatest vulgar poet in English, Shakespeare. It is not so much the four-letter words, which are de rigueur in contemporary literature, as it is his attention to the concerns of ordinary men and women condemned to live in the gloomy postwar decades. Larkin has poems on what we would call a home for senior citizens, boring parties, the miseries of family life, faith healing, small-town weddings, jazz, and the numbing routine of work-a microcosm of modern life.

He could write well on these topics, because he worked at a real job (as librarian for the University of Hull) and lived a real life, no matter how restricted its compass. One of his most attractive qualities is his undisguised contempt for literary professionalism and the endless round of getting and spending grants: "It would be ironic if . . . we were to find that we had killed the goose that laid the golden eggs by choking it with cream." In the same essay ("Subsidizing Poetry") Larkin admits, "I have never read my poems in public, never lectured on poetry, never taught anyone how to write it," and much of his best work deals with the literary racket, including "Posterity"devoted to "Jake Balokowsky, my biographer"-and another poem that here makes its first appearance in a book, "The Life with a Hole in It," with its wonderful denunciation of the literary life:

So the shit in the shuttered chateau Who does his five hundred words, Then parts out the rest of the day Between bathing and booze and

birds . . .

In his lifetime Larkin published a small quantity of verse, and his editor, Anthony Thwaite, observes, "It may come as a surprise that the quantity of Larkin's uncollected and unpublished poetry should be so large." A surprise, yes, but also a disappointment. Thwaite has almost doubled the volume of Larkin's corpus while adding only a small number of poems that will enhance the poet's reputation. Nearly all of these were written between the publication of High Windows (1974) and his death. In addition to "Aubade" and "The Life with a Hole in It," the poems one is really grateful for include "The Mower"-with its deliberate echoes of Larkin's great predecessor from Hull, Andrew Marvell-"The Winter Palace," and "Love Again."

Larkin had strong views on how books of poetry should be put together and more than once complained about "that American way that seems frightened of saying what books the poems came from and when they were published." Mr. Thwaite has avoided Larkin's posthumous curse by carefully indicating the date of each poem and the volume (if any) in which it appeared. The book is arranged chronologically, except for a selection of the earliest work, which is printed as an appendix.

I'm not sure how Larkin would have reacted. Many poets, in putting together a volume of verse, follow the ancient examples of Horace, Vergil, and Ovid, arranging the individual pieces according to some principle other than order of composition. (At the very least this method provides work for dull-witted PhDs.) Larkin's best volumes-Whitsun Weddings and High Windows-have a completeness to them, an effect that is achieved at least partly by the ordering of the poems. That effect is obviously lost in Collected Poems, although Mr. Thwaite does include a table that allows the reader to reconstruct the original volumes.