Philip Larkin, RIP

Philip Larkin, RIP

FOR ABOUT forty years, beginning about 1920, British writers often felt like outsiders to their own literature. The dominant forces in works written in the English language were not British but rather American and Irish: the High Modernists Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Yeats, Stevens. Some British writers, such as Charles Tomlinson, successfully fused the High Modernist mode with Britishness, but this was widely felt to be an uncomfortable liaison. It was not until the later 1950s, partly through the example of Robert Graves, that British poetry got over the great modernists and, with a sigh of relief, returned to its familiar provincialism. The French, the Americans, the Irish, Pound, Laforgue, and all the rest of it could go to hell.

Philip Larkin was central to this recovery of a local Britishness, and to a recovery of British poetic self-confidence. He dared to be minor, and the British loved it. Larkin in his oeuvre may be compared to the American poet John Crowe Ransom. Both produced a very small quantity of exquisitely crafted poetry; both wrote in determinedly traditional verse forms; both were much occupied with the subject of death; and both were intensely private, even reclusive individuals. Eliot identified himself with Dante; Joyce and Pound, with Homer; Crane, with Columbus and Whitman. Larkin was, contentedly, a librarian.

When John Betjeman died there was much talk of Larkin succeeding him as poet laureate. "I dream about that sometimes,' Larkin told Kingsley Amis, "and wake up screaming. With and luck they'll pass me over.' The idea of the poet-laureateship was reinvented by Petrarch during the Renaissance; he had himself crowned at the Capitol. It was consciously connected with the idea of empire. Ben Jonson was the first English poet laureate and a symbol of England's imperial aspirations as the New World was being colonized. Larkin was acutely aware of all the respects in which, for him and for today's England, the idea of a poet laureate was preposterous.

He published three slim books of poetry, one about every ten years: The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974). He wrote with more than enough authority to give back to English poetry a British voice that High Modernism had rendered marginal.

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