Larkin's blues: jazz and modernism - Philip Larkin

NOTES

1 I have used the following abbreviations for frequently cited works by Larkin, for Anthony Thwaite's edition of the letters, and for Andrew Motion's biography: All What Jazz (AWJ), Collected Poems (CP), Required Writing (RW), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (Letters), and Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (Life).

2 In Stomping the Blues Albert Murray quotes (disapprovingly) the definition of the blues offered by the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend - the "tender, ironic, bitter, humorous, or typical expression of a deprived people" (Murray 74). On the issues of the blues as the music of deprivation and the blues as fundamental to both jazz and rock and roll, see, for example, AWJ 36, 86, 87, 234-35, 266, and Life 46-47, 57. In general, Larkin thinks of the blues both as a kind of jazz and as the basis of all jazz. Very early in his jazz career he came to the conclusion that "there is only one kind of jazz, and that's Blues, or music based on the Blues" (Life 46). In All What Jazz he writes that "blues lie at the heart of rock," which is "only certain elements in the blues isolated, coarsened and amplified" (266).

3 This is quoted from a 1968 Guardian interview in Rossen (100). The whole passage is of interest because of Larkin's explicit comparison of jazz and poetry:

In many ways I prefer it to poetry. I listen to it while dressing in the morning, turning to it in a way I should turn to poetry if I were living my life according to Vernon Watkins's standards. What did Baudelaire say, man can live a week without bread but not a day without poetry. You might say I can live a week without poetry but not a day without jazz.

4 The reviews continued until December 1971. The first edition of All What Jazz (1970) contains the reviews between 1961 and 1968. The second edition (1985) adds the reviews of the last three years.

5 In The Name and Nature of Poetry Housman argues against extending the word poetry to verse that does not merit the term. Rather than calling it bad poetry we should not call it poetry at all:

We should beware of treating the word poetry as chemists have treated the word salt. Salt is a crystalline substance recognised by its taste; its name is as old as the English language and is the possession of the English people, who know what it means: it is not the private property of a science less than three hundred years old. . . . The right model for imitation is that chemist who, when he encountered, or thought he had encountered, a hitherto nameless form of matter, did not purloin for it the name of something else, but invented out of his own head a name which should be proper to it, and enriched the vocabulary of modern man with the useful word gas. If we apply the word poetry to an object which does not resemble, either in form or content, anything which has heretofore been so called, not only are we maltreating and corrupting language, but we may be guilty of disrespect and blasphemy. (174) The passage that occasioned this distinction is from Crashaw's "The Weeper": "Two walking baths, two weeping motions, / Portable and compendious oceans."