Review by New York Times Review
Philip Larkin's body of work is so slender and, often, so seemingly slight, so devoid of belly fat and blather, as to make Elizabeth Bishop (whom I now think of as his nearest American counterpart) look like a blimp and a bigmouth. Of the 730 pages of "The Complete Poems," a mere 90 are taken up by those poems Larkin saw fit to collect in his lifetime. One of the main challenges posed by this edition is that it asks us to reconcile the discrepancy between those slim 90 pages and the sprawling rest. What's evident immediately is that the qualities that have, so far, allowed Bishop to triumph over her American contemporaries (notably Lowell) have their counterparts in Larkin, who has, so far, triumphed over his English contemporaries (notably Hughes). Bishop's characteristic modesty, meticulousness and, even, anti-Modernism are everywhere to be found in Larkin; what gives the archetypical speaker of a Larkin poem his very particular tone of voice, though, is the peculiarly English sense of his being at once slightly muffled and slightly miffed: I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed. Every third month I book myself in at The ______ Hotel in ____ton for three days. The boots carries my lean old leather case Up to a single, where I hang my hat. One beer, and then "the dinner," at which I read The ____shire Times from soup to stewed pears. Births, deaths. For sale. Police court. Motor spares. Though this poem comes from his last collection, "High Windows" (1974), one may detect in that final line of the stanza the abiding influence of W.B. Yeats as list maker. Larkin has tipped onto Yeats's pile of "old kettles, old bottles and a broken can" (from "The Circus Animals' Desertion") his own "motor spares." Such integration hadn't happened with Larkin's somewhat premature first collection, "The North Ship" (1945), which was so utterly awash in Yeatsiana - swans, wheels, horsemen, dancers, more birds, apples, another horseman - as to be swamped. It was only with the publication in 1955 of "The Less Deceived" that Larkin became Larkin. He now showed himself to be the single best big stanza maker after Yeats, but he also managed to fuse the bravura of Byzantium with the banality of Bisto, the gravy mix that was once a staple of the English Sunday lunch: Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows now long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence These last two lines from the opening stanza of "Church Going," his first great poem, present us with the apogee of that muttering, moping persona we'd soon come to describe as "Larkinesque." Yeats's high-concept, cyclical "gyres" have given way to the humdrum "cycle-clips." Church and state in postwar England are connected, but connected primarily in the sense that "there's nothing going on." It's no accident that "The Less Deceived," much of which was written while Larkin worked as a librarian at Queen's University, Belfast, was published a year before the Suez crisis, generally thought to be the death knell of the British Empire. The atmosphere of the Larkin poem would soon be publicly, and popularly, recognized as being perfectly in harmony with the doubting, dowdy, dutiful, down-in-the-dumps environment of Britain in the 1950s. The magnificent title poem of Larkin's third book, "The Whitsun Weddings" (1964), shows Larkin setting himself within the tradition not only of Yeats but of the 12 poets he professed always to keep "within reach of my working chair." These were Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen: At first, I didn't notice what a noise The weddings made Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys The interest of what's happening in the shade, And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls I took for porters larking with the mails, And went on reading. Once we started, though, We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls In parodies of fashion, heels and veils, All posed irresolutely, watching us go, As if out on the end of an event Waving goodbye To something that survived it. Archie Burnett's commentary to "The Complete Poems," which aims to be exhaustive, is sometimes exhausting. In his notes on "The Whitsun Weddings," for example, he draws attention both to John Osborne's rather persuasive argument that the poem is in dialogue with Eliot's "Waste Land" and to the gossip from one of Larkin's colleagues at the Hull University Library that Larkin had told him that the line "I took for porters larking with the mails" contained "a punning reference to a student, Miss Porter, whom he professed to lust after." No direct mention is made by Burnett of the pun, in "larking," on the poet's own name, or the possibility that the "porters" may just as readily refer to "Mrs. Porter and her daughter" from "The Waste Land." Except, perhaps, in the area of "lusting after," where the Larkin persona who's unlucky in love bears little resemblance to the historical Larkin (vying as he does with Yeats not only in the stanza department but in his tendency to be involved with two or three women at any time), there's quite a bit of overlap between art and life. Given his eye for the ladies, Larkin would probably not have been a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States, not even in 1974, the year Nixon resigned and "High Windows" was published. In quite a number of that volume's best-known poems, including "This Be the Verse," Larkin risks appearing as a version of the "uncle shouting smut" who shows up on a station platform in "The Whitsun Weddings." It's certainly the case that the publication in 1992 of his "Selected Letters" caused a bit of a plummet in Larkin's stock; this "Complete Poems" will hardly counter his reputation as a racy, and racist, old codger who wasn't above a swipe at a homosexual, a Jew or even the odd Irishman. When "The Less Deceived" was turned down by the Dolmen Press in 1954, for example, Larkin would write to his main squeeze, Monica Jones, that at least one poem might have been "too sexy, I suppose, for the priest-ridden crooked little lice." This is diligently recorded by Burnett in his commentary on the collection, as is the remark Larkin made about Vikram Seth in a letter to Robert Conquest: "Another load of crap from this Vikram Seth character, known to you I believe. Quite pleasant stuff, but fails to grip. Comes of being an Oriental, I suspect" I've mentioned that a mere 90 pages of this book make up the poems Larkin chose to publish in his four collections, including "The North Ship." The rest are taken up largely with the commentary, and with "other poems published in the poet's lifetime" - of which two, "Aubade" and "Love," are just about worth a second look. Hardly worth even a first look are any of the page after page of "poems not published in the poet's lifetime." These include such drolleries as the couplet "Walt Whitman/Was certainly no titman." Isn't it worth asking why these poems were unpublished in the poet's lifetime? Might it be that they were, and are, a "load of crap"? Like Bishop, Larkin is not particularly well served by having every napkin- or matchbook-jotting published. Almost none of these matchbook-jottings illuminate the essential core of Larkin's work in the way that "Inventions of the March Hare," say, casts significant light on early Eliot. In the end, though, such is the strength and solidity of that essential core that Larkin's reputation as the archetypical English poet of the second half of the 20th century should persist well into the 21st. Paul Muldoon is the poetry editor of The New Yorker. His latest book of poems is "Maggot."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The most popular poet of his time in England, Larkin (1922-85) bids fair to becoming the best-loved English poet of the latter twentieth century. To 116 pages of work published in his lifetime, this complete edition of his poetry adds 203 pages of poems he chose not to publish. Such inclusiveness often gives us too much of good thing; that is hardly the case here. Keenly intelligent and knowledgeable, a master of formal poetry, given to the epigrammatic, yet undogmatically modernist in choosing to write of observable common life, his own and what he saw of others', both of his class and, quite often, not Larkin never restrained his negative emotions but was not overpowered by them. He's no male Dorothy Parker, despite his possibly most famous line, They fuck you up, your mum and dad. He realized there are no alternatives to the lives we have, and he did find bravery and joy in them (see The Whitsun Weddings ). Editor Burnett follows the poems proper with 339 pages of textual notes, tracing just about every source Larkin definitely drew upon or, even half-consciously, might have drawn upon. Except by citing Larkin's own remarks in letters and conversation, these are informative, not critical, notes. Make this the one Larkin collection to have and hold.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The poems of British master Philip Larkin (1922-1985), one of the great mid-century poets in English, have had a frustrating life since the death of their author: this is the third book of Larkin poems bearing the word Collected or Complete in their titles. The first Collected was an edition edited by Anthony Thwaite containing poems Larkin published during his lifetime as well as uncollected and unpublished work, all of its arranged in chronological order, dispensing with Larkin's own arrangement of his poems in his published books. The second Collected redressed this omission by publishing only those poems Larkin collected in the four volumes of poetry-The North Ship; The Less Deceived; The Whitsun Weddings; and the famous High Windows-as arranged in those original volumes. This third edition contains all the poems included in the previous volumes plus poems from Early Poems and Juvenilia as well as other scattered poems not previously published. Burnett also includes comprehensive notes. Larkin was a master versifier, but within strict meter and rhyme he could be both disarmingly casual and utterly precise, the only poet capable of turning a kind of grumpiness into transcendent truth telling: "Death," he notes, "is no different whined at than withstood." This will be an essential book for poetry lovers. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
