Geoffrey Hill, find few readers. The enthusiasm with which identifiable groups
responded to the American ‘Beat’ poets, or to John Betjeman or Sylvia Plath or Tony
Harrison, is due as much to non-literary factors in the predispositions of readers as
to merit in the poets. Subject-matter can generate interest: the Holocaust, Northern
Irish ‘Troubles’, the death of a beloved person, minority politics. Other poetry has
had to be sold hard to reach a readership of any size. It is rare for a general publica-
tion to carry any verse; all poetry magazines are little magazines. As Auden wrote in
‘The Fall of Rome’, ‘All the literati keep / An imaginary friend.’ In a period when
novelists have received advances of half a million pounds, none of the poets named
above has made any sort of a living from the sales of poems. The sardonic Philip
Larkin once remarked of his friend Kingsley Amis, a poet turned successful novelist,
‘He has outsoared the shadow of our night’, a sentence from Percy Shelley’s elegy for
John Keats. In 1998 Oxford University Press axed its poetry list. It was bought by a
poetry publisher whose firm survives on permission fees for the more famous
poems of the more famous poets on his list; not from sales of their books. But popu-
larity isn’t everything, and good poetry deserves no less space than good fiction or
drama.
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Of post-war English poets, the reputation ofPhilip Larkin(1922–1985) seems most
assured. His Collected Poems has many of the best poems of its time. The title of the
slim volume that made his name,The Less Deceived, inverts a line from Shakespeare,
‘I loved you not’, says Hamlet to Ophelia, who replies: ‘I was the more deceived’. Not
to be deceived was one of Larkin’s chief aims in a life in which he protected himself.
His father, who had a bust of the efficient Adolf Hitler on his mantlepiece, was Town
Clerk of Coventry, a city efficiently destroyed by German bombs while young Larkin
was at Oxford. He hid a wounded Romantic temperament behind a mask of irony,
and became known as an anti-romantic, thanks to poems of disgust and despair,
such as Annus Mirabilis, ‘This Be the Verse’, ‘The Old Fools’ and ‘Aubade’.
A better way into Larkin is ‘Cut Grass’:
Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death
It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,
White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.
This is a Georgian poem, Shakespearian in its final gesture, a last breath of English
pastoral, the syntax dancing carefully in its tiny metres. Larkin joked that depriva-
tion was to him what daffodils were to Wordsworth; but he confessed that he could
find Wordsworth’s poetry ‘heart-breaking’, and at its best his own work can have that
same quality. It is with suppressed anger, pity and humour that he views the
POETRY 395Philip Larkin(1922–1985)
Novels: Jill(1946), A Girl in
Winter(1947). Verse: The
North Ship(1945), The Less
Deceived(1955), The Whitsun
Weddings(1964), High
Windows(1974), Collected
Poems (1988).Philip Larkin (1922–1985).