Analysis of Old Fools.

The hands of many serious poets graced pages of paper over the centuries. Their
use of formal words convey universal truths and invoke deep feelings. Philip Larkin
is not one of them. Philip Larkin achieves a similar, if not a more profound effect,
using a different approach. Philip Larkin uses exaggeration to emphasize the
focuses of his poems.
When Philip Larkin wants a point of his poem to stand out, he says something the
reader would not expect to hear. He uses this attention-grabbing word or phrase to
draw the reader's attention to what he is trying to say in the poem. He also uses
words and ideas that are not socially proper such as his references to sex and
violence. Philip Larkin employs the technique of exaggeration in the poems "A Study
of Reading Habits", "Money", "To Failure", and "The Old Fools".

Exaggeration is used for much of the poem in "A Study of Reading Habits". Philip
Larkin begins the poem by saying that reading books have helped him with
everything except school. He also gives an example of how books have helped him.
He claims that because of books, he has extraordinary fighting powers. He claims
he can "...deal out the old right hook To dirty dogs twice my size." Obviously books
do not make anyone very good at fighting. He would better prepare for a fight by
exercising than by "...getting (his) nose in a book..." Because reading is not a usual
way to get ready for a fight, the reader can assume that he, in fact, has not fought
with people twice his size. Instead, that was just something that he read and is
exaggerating his abilities to match that. By over exaggerating his fighting abilities,
Philip Larkin draws the reader's attention to the meaning that books give him.

Next, the speaker says that, "...Evil was just my lark...", meaning that he had
become evil. He claims that he "...Had ripping times in the dark/The women I
clubbed with sex! I broke them up like meringues", meaning he had sex with many
women and treated them violently. The reader may very well believe this claim
except for the fact that he did those acts of evil "Later, with inch-thick specs..." This
statement is a connection to the first stanza when he said, "...It was worth ruining
my eyes..." We can assume that he is talking about something he read in a book in
this stanza as well. It does not seem typical of a bookworm to be evil and violent. In
addition to the exaggeration of his behavior, the speaker talks about sex and
violence. These topics are effective at capturing the attention of the reader because
it is not usual, and almost socially unacceptable, to reference them in a poem.

In the final stanza, Philip Larkin says that the stories in books are too familiar to
him, so he does not read much any more. The speaker leaves the reader by offering
the reader some valuable advice: "Get stewed: Books are a load of crap." In order to
get the reader to understand the way he feels about books, he tells them to get
drunk because books are so bad that being drunk is preferable. Being drunk has a
negative social connotation and does harm people. The speaker gives us the
impression that reading is worse This exaggeration would receive a receive a
negative reaction from many people, but it is more memorable for that reason.
Those that had a negative reaction to his statement would not have remembered it
as well if it were saying something socially acceptable like, 'books are good.'

Philip Larkin's work is widely discussed among literary critics. Being so wildly
discussed, the topic of Philip Larkin's use of exaggeration has been brought up. Alan
Browjohn believes "(Philip Larkin's) language is never flat..." (Browjohn 254). This
idea goes along with the idea that Philip Larkin uses exaggeration to makes his
poems stand out.

Browjohn also says that Philip Larkin "[reaches] across accepted literary boundries
for a word that will precisely express what he intends" (Browjohn 254). This
supports the idea that Philip Larkin will use socially unacceptable words and ideas to
make his poems stand out. In order to get his ideas across and "express what he
intends" in "A Study of Reading Habits", Philip Larkin makes references to getting
drunk, sex, and violence. All of these ideas are not typically discussed in a socially
proper environment.

The literary criticism of Katha Pollitt also ties back to "A Study of Reading Habits".
Pollitt says, "This little drama of sexual shame and insomnia is one that Larkin would
depict again and again, using many of the same materials" (Pollitt 1). Pollitt is
saying that Philip Larkin uses these socially unacceptable ideas repeatedly
throughout his works.

In "To Failure", Philip Larkin explains the true nature of failure using exaggeration.
Philip Larkin's first exaggeration is in his description of the misconception of failure.
He says that failure "...do(es) not come dramatically, with dragons/ That rear up
with my life between their paws/ And dash me down beside the wagons./ The horses
panicking... " Failure is not like a dragon that makes everything panic and kills you.
To get this point across more clearly, the speaker goes into a violent description of
what a dragon would do if he wanted to kill you. This the violence description of this

description is exaggerated to make the reader pay attention to that statement.

They then understand that failure is nothing like the noisy, violent dragons.

Philip Larkin exaggerates the clarity of contracts. He says that contracts "...Clearly
set out to warn what can be lost, what out-of-pocket expenses must be borne." By
that he means if failure was like a contract, if would tell you when it was, what is
was going to do, and when it was going to do it. If contracts were that straight
forward, we would not need lawyers to write and and a court system to interpret
them. The point of this statement was not to convey the clarity of contracts,
however. Instead, this exaggeration was done to make it clear to the reader that
failure is not straight forward.

The speaker then says "...nor as a draughty ghost/ That's seen, some morning,
running down a lawn." The existence of ghosts has long been debated and has not
yet been confirmed. However, a ghost makes for a good, unexpected exaggeration.
If one saw a ghost in one's front yard, he or she would be frightened or surprised.
Either way, the ghost would immediately draw one's attention.

After that, the speaker says "It is these sunless afternoons, I fine/ Install you at my
elbow like a bore. The chestnut trees cakes with silence. I'm aware the days pass
quicker than before,/ Smell staler too." That means that the speaker realizes that his
or her life has become meaning less. Then the speakers realizes that failure was
with him or her the whole time when the speaker says, "...once they fall behind/
They look like ruin. You have been here some time." This is an exaggeration
because of the speaker's obvious attention to the details in his or her life. If
someone is able to detect such changes, such as the days passing more quickly, the
days smelling staler, or the trees being caked with silence, then it would be
expected that they would ask why. If they asked themselves why, they would come
to the conclusion that they are a failure. Instead, many years pass and then he or
she looks back at his or her life and realizes he was a failure. This is exaggeration
because even though one may not notice failure immediately, like a dragon or a
ghost, it would not take us the rest of our lives to realize we have something wrong.

Not all agree on how Philip Larkin uses exaggeration. Some even do not even think
that Philip Larkin uses exaggeration. An article by Daniel Jones and John D.
Jorgenson makes the case that Philip Larkin does not use exaggeration to attract the
attention of his readers. Jones and Jorgenson state that, "Of these twenty three
(works) are simply and self-effacing lynumbered, and of the remainder some have

noncommittal titles such as "Dawn", "Winter" and "Night Music"-never a good tactic
for leaving a clear impression on the reader's mind."(Jones 276). As Jones states,
such simple titles are not effective at drawing in the reader. If it were Philip Larkin's
style to grab the reader's attention, then he would not be using such dull titles.

However, the use dull titles can be part of the process of capturing the reader's
attention. When Philip Larkin gives a poem the title of "To Failure", the reader
develops a certain expectation of what the poem will be about. After forming this
expectation, the reader starts to read and sees Philip Larkin writing about dragons
and ghost. Philip Larkin then refutes the socially accepted view of failure, something
obvious that explodes in your face, and replace it with a different idea, the idea that
failure is subtle and slowly decays one's life.

The literary analysis of Alan Browjohn seems to support the idea of starting off
bland then introducing exaggeration. Browjohn said, "His language is never flat,
unless he intends it so for a particular reason, and his diction is never stereotyped"
(Browjohn 254). Browjohn implies that Philip Larkin can use flat language "unless he
intends so for a particular reason." In this case, the 'particular reason' is to work
toward his main goal of capturing the reader attention. In contrasting attentiongrabbing words and boring, undescriptive titles, Philip Larkin is able to more
effectively grab the attention of the reader as opposed to making everything an
exaggeration.

Another literary critic who did not believe Philip Larkin used exaggeration is T.J.
Ross. Ross said, "The one distinguishing feature granted Larkin was his presumed
depressing tone. Few reviewers failed to quote his most cited quip: "Deprivation is
for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth"" (Ross 1). Ross states that Philip Larkin
uses deprivation, not exaggeration, as the basis for his poems. Ross even uses a
Philip Larkin quote, ""Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." By
quoting Philip Larkin himself, Ross makes a very strong argument. However, even
though there are certainly examples of deprivation in "A Study of Reading Habits"
and "To Failure", exaggeration is most certainly the more dominant of the two.

T.J. Ross also said, "In keeping with the emphasis on the ordinary and the intimate,
the language of the poet exemplifies the Wordsworthian view of the poet's language
as the language ordinarily spoken by one person to another." Ross refutes the idea
that Philip Larkin uses exaggeration to shock the reader by saying that Philip Larkin
uses the same language as the reader. If this were true, there would be no element

of shock or surprise if Philip Larkin uses the words that the reader would say. There
would also be no shock due to socially unacceptable words or phrases.

In "Money", Philip Larkin says that others claim that he does not use his money well.
His money tells him that money is "...all you never had of goods and sex, You can
still get them by writing a few cheques." There are two exaggerations in this
statement. The first is his claim this his money is telling him that he is not using his
money well. Money can not actually talk, but it catches the attention of the reader if
he says his money is talking to him. The talking money probably refers to others
scolding him about his misuse of money. Philip Larkin uses talking money to draw
the reader's attention to the importance of money in society. Philip Larkin actually
goes on the make that same point in other instances throughout the rest of the
poem.

Philip Larkin uses the second stanza to exaggerate what others do with their money.
He says that "By now they've a second house and car and wife...". A second house
and car are luxuries that one does not need. The speak says that if one has money,
one will spend it on unnecessary luxuries. The exaggeration of the luxuries implores
the reader to ask: if money is only good for unnecessary items, then why is money
necessary?

The speaker next explains that money is essentially worthless by saying "...the
money you save Won't in the end buy you more than a shave." That is also an
exaggeration. Money can certainly buy one more than just a shave. There is much
to be bought with money, even the speaker just explain that people with money can
buy houses and cars. In the end, however, those things are about as significant as a
shave. After you die, a rich man has as much as a poor man, a soul.

Jones and Jorgenson also refute the idea that Philip Larkin uses exaggeration in his
writing. "Much of Larkin's best poetry in his next two books caters for that 'hunger
to be serious'" (Jones 279). The content of "Money" does not seem serious at all.
The speaker has money talking to him. There are also exaggerations as to ideas of
luxury and necessity.

Jones and Jorgenson also imply that Philip Larkin is gentle when they say, "Any
harsher note of irony than the 'twenty seconds' and the 'warm spring rain'...would

mar the quality of sympathy and tip the poem over into anger or cynicism" (Jones
281).

In "The Old Fools", Philip Larkin shows his point of view on the elderly. It is socially
expected that one should treat his or her elders with respect. Philip Larkin takes a
different stance. Philip Larkin gives many examples of how the elderly are past their
prime. He exaggerates these examples by putting the elderly on the same level as
babies. Philip Larkin exaggerates the diminished brain function of the elderly by
asking the reader, "Do they somehow suppose It's more grown-up when your mouth
hangs open and drools, And you keep on pissing yourself, and you can't remember
Who called this morning?" He also suggests that they are only able to live in the
past by saying that they would change the way things are so they could be young
again. Again he insults their intelligence by saying that they cant even tell the
difference between now and then; that their memories are so bad that they think
they were always old. Philip Larkin further exaggerates the decline of their minds by
saying that they entertain themselves by watching light move. Philip Larkin uses all
of these exaggerations to put old people on a different level than middle aged
people.

In the final stanza starts by, again, commenting on the poor memory of the elderly.
Philip Larkin relates poor memory to rooms growing further apart. He says this is
due to "...the constant wear and tear of taken breath." This is not likely because
when a person breathes, it does not negatively effect their mind. Unless Philip
Larkin meant the 'wear and tear of breath' to symbolize the time that passes over
one's life, he was trying to be Philistine and ignorant of the actual mental condition
of the elderly.

"The Old Fools" expresses several complicated ideas such as death, dying, and life
after death. However, Philip Larkin uses these complex themes to his advantage.
Alan Browjohn says that "...in all the poems there is a lucidity of language which
invites understanding even when the ideas are paradoxical or complex" (Browjohn
255). Even though Philip Larkin is expressing complex ideas, he is able to use them
to draw the attention of his reader. Complex and paradoxical ideas are more likely
to catch the attention of the reader rather that a dull, dim-witted concept. By
expressing his ideas on these topics in a language that is easy to understand, Philip
Larkin makes a definite and lasting impression on the reader.

The literary criticism of C.B. Cox may provide new insight on Philip Larkin's writing
style. Philip Larkin may actually be doing more with his writing that trying to attract
the attention of the reader through exaggeration and going against the social norm.
Cox maintains that Philip Larkin, "...is trying to establish an anti-heroic mode as the
only viable form of moral and social honesty left available in present-day conditions"
(Cox). According to Cox, Philip Larkin is not only trying to capture the attention of
his reader, but he always wants to redefine the anti-hero to be suitable for the
present. This idea can be shown by looking at the speaker of several of Philip
Larkin's poems. In "A Study of Reading Habits", the speaker is a bookworm who
pretends that he is strong and has a lot of sex with women. In "To Failure", the
speaker is looking back at a long line of failures. In "Money", the speaker is being
scolded for not using his money well. In "The Old Fools", the speaker is cynical
toward the elderly. Throughout all of these there is a common theme: the speaker is
not in sync to the beliefs of society.

The speakers in "A Study of Reading Habits", "To Failure", "Money", and "The Old
Fools" are not proper or sophisticated, so one may consider them Philistines. In this
respect, Cox says that, "This bluff Philistinism is often taken as Larkin's own voice"
(Cox). His point about the misconception of Larkin's actual voice aside, Cox supports
the idea that Philip Larkin uses socially unacceptable concepts and words in his
poems.

It is easier for people to accept things that are in black and white, however many
things are actually a shade of gray. If the reader has a definition of the elderly
possibly being intelligent, the message of the poem may be confused. By using
exaggerations, Philip Larkin creates this 'black and white effect.' By using
exaggeration, Philip Larkin can be sure that he will be remembered by many of his
readers.

If only Larkin had given us another collection on the level of The Less Deceived or
The Whitsun Weddings, we would indeed have cause to be grateful, deeply so. High
Windows, alas, is not nearly so consistent an achievement as they were, and for
reasons which are important, and seem to contradict Larkin's own avowed belief
that a poet does not need to develop. For the lesson of this book seems to be that in
poetry you cannot stand still: if you do not move forwards, then you begin to move
backwards, or slip sideways.

Larkin himself has said that he doesn't know how he writes well, and looking at the
best poems in High Windows one can see to what an extent the impulse is
involuntary. The title poem gives us the clue:

And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Rather than words, the image. Perhaps Larkin's most distinctive poems are those
which achieve themselves by a sudden dislocation of the argument into a visual
image that 'leaves/Nothing to be said.' In The Less Deceived 'Wedding Wind', 'Next,
Please' and 'Deceptions' all use this technique, in very different ways. In The
Whitsun Weddings a visual image initiates the movement of 'Dockery And Son': in
'Days' another sharply concludes it. In his new collection Larkin relies on this
technique more than ever before, and the conclusive images of 'High Windows',
'Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel', 'Money' and 'The Explosion' are, I suspect,
what we will chiefly remember from it. Other poets, Auden, for instance, can conjure
up any number of apt, illustrative images, snap-shots and vignettes, as Larkin
himself can: but only Larkin produces, as if by a jerk of the unconscious, images at
once so plangent and so final. (p. 112)

Larkin's previous work should remind us how much is missing. Looking back to
'Here', 'The Whitsun Weddings', 'An Arundel Tomb', one sees that the visual
haunting was there alright, but as part of a much broader, more inclusive structure.
The effort of style that this implies, supporting and extending, even, perhaps,
evoking the involuntary impulse, is central to Larkin's achievement in his best work.
The procedure of these poems is as much metaphysical as visual. Indeed, they have
a strong sense of being thoroughly argued through. Their assimilation of the reality
that surrounds them is equally thorough. It was these poems, after all, that altered
our awareness of poetry's capacity to reflect the contemporary world. As deliberate
as Larkin's self-restriction to idiosyncrasy elsewhere is his assumption here of a
communal voice, which continues through such poems as 'Ambulances', 'Faith
Healing' and 'Essential Beauty'. Wasn't there, in fact, a very real development from
the totally private world of The Less Deceived, only falteringly foreshadowed in
'Church Going', and stylistically perhaps in 'I Remember, I Remember'? 'The Whitsun

Weddings' could almost be seen as a translation into contemporary speech of the

final sonorities of 'Church Going'. Perception, colloquialism, and humour are welded
together into what is, as much as anything, a triumphant technical resolution.

Where in High Windows would one look to find anything approaching this marriage
of humanity and technique? Only to 'The Old Fools' or 'Vers de Socit', and they're
unequal marriages. One should be able to look to 'To the Sea' or 'Show Saturday',
but set either of those beside 'The Whitsun Weddings' and they look pretty inert. Or
compare 'Ambulances', whose verse form binds its ironies so tightly, with the
pedestrian pace of 'The Building'.

That the weakness of High Windows should reveal itself as a technical weakness is
not surprising, though it is surprising that it hasn't been the subject of comment.
Technical advance, surely, results from a poet's engagement and recalcitrant
material, and there's abundant evidence in High Windows to show that there's been
no such engagement. In this respect, the way in which 'Show Saturday' fails to
clinch its 'regenerate union' is symptomatic. Larkin's stylistic unity, of the colloquial
and the sacramental, is falling apart, because his two mental worlds have fallen
apart. We are either among 'the rusting soup-tins', with a strong sense of dj-vu,
or, more often, we are back pre-1914, before innocence had left the country. 'The
Trees', 'Dublinesque', 'How Distant', 'Cut Grass', 'The Explosion' all suggest a quick
answer to the old charge that Larkin is a neo-Georgian: one can discard the neo-,
and simply say Georgian. This is a step back in every sense: compare the stiff
monotone of 'Forget What Did' or 'Cut Grass' with the subtlety of 'Coming' in The
Less Deceived.

Nowhere, outside the journeyman 'Going, Going', do the England of Larkin's

imagination and the England in which we really live come into the sort of conflict
that could generate further advance. High Windows shows a talent in retreat to the
edges of its concern. The edges of a talent are strange regions. 'Solar' or 'The
Explosion' suggest that Larkin may continue to write poems in whose quality there
is an element of the miraculous: but he will no longer be, he is not already, the
Larkin we have valued up till now, a man writing out of the centre of his talent,
making poetry from the world in which he and his readers actually live. (pp. 113-14)

Roger Garfitt, in London Magazine ( London Magazine 1974), October-November,

1974.

Larkin is really one of the best poets now writing, a somewhat bitter swan plunging
down the waters of the so sad Thames. He is a dangerous satirical poet, killing
where Betjeman is comfy. And yet he is an inheritor of the sweetest strains of
English poesy, at times as lucid and airy and heartening as Wordsworth, Spenser, or
Shakespeare. He deserves to be, human and lovely as he is, a classic. (p. 50)

Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1976, by the Virginia Quarterly Review, The
University of Virginia), Vol. 52, No. 2 (Spring, 1976).

Philip Larkin describes ["Jill," his] first novel, originally published in 1946, as "in
essence an unambitious short story." This is a modest remark, and the modesty is
not misplaced, for "Jill" is indeed a quiet, gray, inconclusive little book, with a gray
hero, and a plot so slight that readers might be forgiven for thinking, as I did, that
the final blank pages of the volume were a mistake of the printers, and that some
dramatic denouement had been accidentally omitted. But this is not so: the
inconsequential ending is deliberate. Some might expect this of Larkin, the poet of
half-tones and gray moods, suburban melancholy and accepted regrets, but in fact
the poet is much better at conclusions than the novelist: most of Larkin's poems, at
least in his last three volumes, are remarkable for their devastating and bitter punch
lines. In "Jill," there is much of the gloom, little of the bitter precision of wit.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting book for several reasons. It was written when the
author was 21, and has some most accomplished passages of descriptive prose
notably the hero's visit to his bombed hometown, Huddlesford. (Larkin's own
birthplace was Coventry, one of the most heavily bombarded towns in Britain.) At
the least, it is a noteworthy piece of juvenilia by one of England's finest poets. It
also has, according to the American critic James Gindin, the first example of "that
characteristic landmark of the British postwar novel, the displaced working-class
hero."

As a working-class hero, in fact, John is singularly spineless: unlike the defiant and
ambitious characters that people the novels and plays of Amis, Wain, Braine,
Osborne, Wesker, he seems all too keen to learn the ways of his social superiors,
even when those ways [are] repulsive. None of the joys, all the embarrassments
of youth are carefully catalogued. Maybe this is Larkin's point. Being young was not
much fun in those days, for that kind of boy. In a poem published recently, "Annus
Mirabilis," the older Larkin deplores the fact that the younger Larkin missed out on
the good times, and was too old for the wonderful year of 1963, when the Beatles

and sexual intercourse were invented. Times have changed, and "Jill" is certainly a
useful sociological record by which to date those changes.

But perhaps the most curious section of this volume is Larkin's own introduction.
There are, in fact, two introductions, one written in 1963, and a postscript to it,
composed specially for this edition in 1975. Anyone interested in the history of
attitudes and ideas will find these compelling reading. In the 1963 section, Larkin
sets out, ostensibly, to explain wartime Oxford to the American reader. This was not,
he says, the rowdy lavish Oxford of Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall," where young
bloods threw champagne parties and threw one another in fountains: it was a more
serious, sober place, and was far less concerned with class distinctions. This seems
a curious preface to a novel in which people do indeed drink too much (admittedly
beer), throw one another in fountains and appear to be more class conscious than
would seem conceivable to the average 18-year-old today. Larkin then goes on to
tell us that he himself was not at all like his protagonist John, and that he had a lot
of lovely friends. This passage I found wholly mystifying. Until I read it. I thought I
knew what Oxford was like; after finishing it, quite bemused by a string of Christian
namesNorman who? Bruce who? Kingsley who? Ah yes, thank goodness one can
spot that one, Kingsley AmisI felt that Oxford was, after all, an exclusive clique
about which the outsider could never learn a thing. So much for explanations for
foreigners and youngsters.

In the 1975 addendum, Larkin remarks that despite all efforts to dissociate himself
from the feeble John, he still finds readers identify him with his own creation. This
annoys him, as does, apparently, the passing of the collegiate system that his own
novel renders so unattractive. And, finally, he disclaims the myth that he was
himself a scholarship boy: "thanks to my father's generosity," he says drily, "my
education was at no time a charge on public or other funds." This may be a dry joke:
it may be a genuine disclaimer of virtues of effort he never possessed; but it is
worth remarking, (in Larkin's words "American readers may need reminding") that it
is an extraordinary thing for an Englishman to say. The phrase "a charge on public
funds" rings very oddly. One wonders what the 1984 introduction will have to say
about British education. (p. 5)

Margaret Drabble, in The New York Times Book Review ( 1976 by The New York
Times Company; reprinted by permission), May 16, 1976.

No living poet can equal Larkin on his own ground of the familiar English lyric,
drastically and poignantly limited in its sense of any life beyond, before or after, life
today in England. Within these limits the life is registered with superb economy and
immediacy. So much so that when reading Larkin one often feels that no poet could
write much closer to the quick of post-Christian, post-imperial England without also
surrendering to those of its elements (mainly commercial but civic and political too)
which, a few years ago in a poem called 'England', Davie was attacking with clipped
invective as obscene, false and vandalistic. Yet in spite of 'lapses' which outside
their ironic context sound like total capitulations to the enemy ('Books are a load of
crap'), Larkin shares just as much of Davie's lower-middle/professional-class sense
of pudeur and care for politeness as is consistent with his, less frontal, way of caring
for social truththat is, by not respecting sacred cows or underwriting any promises
of pneumatic bliss. The most 'common' feature of his work is a recurrent cautionary
tale of frustrations beforehand and desolations afterwards which we all suffer
because of the expansive fantasies we pay, twice over, to share with our various
pundits and image-makers. If in Larkin's England the fantasies are unusually timid
and cozy (as compared with those of, say, Emma Bovary or Jay Gatsby), they just as
often, and more cruelly, betray. At the same time, though, Larkin frequently exposes
the funny Walter Mitty side of the picture and discovers not merely a few minor
beans-and-bangers satisfactions in the only life we have but also, in himself and
others, shy tendernesses and risible family likenesses which do help brace one for
the inevitable one-way excursion down Cemetery Road.

Larkin himself is now the nation's most successful maker of poetic images, and his
work surely must become increasingly important and consolatory for an England of
still-diminishing expectations. For within the limits of his expectations of poetry and
people, Larkin is a great and even national poet, and few poets who work outside
those limitsTed Hughes is a partial exceptioncan hope to match his popular
value and appeal. (pp. 45-6)

George Dekker, in Agenda, Summer, 1976.

Philip Larkin's most irreverent revision of John Keats rejects the famous dichotomy
of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn." "I have always believed," Larkin writes, "that beauty
is beauty, truth truth, that is not all ye know on earth nor all ye need to know." Yet
Larkin's achievement as a poet demonstrates a more profound reappraisal of
romantic values than is evident in any of his wryly dogmatic critical
pronouncements. In particular, "The Whitsun Weddings" may be viewed as a
searching revaluation of Keats's art in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

Larkin himself discourages such comparative treatment of his work. He has stated
that one of the pleasures of writing poetry is the release it bestows "from reading
poems by other people," and that "experience makes literature look insignificant
beside life." Life would seem to have wholly displaced art as a source for this
poet's inspiration.

Yet his persistent choice of traditional poetic forms creates an undeniable link
between his work and that of previous poets, even as his comments disclaim any
connection. Especially in so highly accomplished a poet as Larkin, traditional form
actively contributes to the poem's experience, enlarging its range of meaning
instead of acting merely as a "transparent" means of expression. Thus, when Philip
Larkin chooses to write "The Whitsun Weddings" in the stanzaic form that Keats
evolved for his great odes, his decision allows a wider frame of reference to enrich
and interact with the experiences that his poem conveyswhether or not that
frame of reference is uppermost in his reflections about the process of composition.

This characteristic resonance of traditional form gives warrant for an interpretation

of "The Whitsun Weddings" that takes account of its distinctive formal context. I
take further warrant from a critical principle that is more appreciative than
formalist, one voiced most memorably by Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual
Talent": "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets
and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and
comparison, among the dead." The approach may represent what Larkin derisively
calls "poetry as syllabus," but I believe that it allows us to achieve a fuller valuation
of at least one of his poems. (pp. 529-31)

[Keats's odes] share a common goal: the attainment of timelessness through art, a
romantic theme that they carry to its highest pitch. For Philip Larkin, however,
"our element is time." Instead of inhabiting some untrodden region of the poet's
mind and encouraging him to "leave the world unseen," poetry has the task of
recording and reflecting on the imperfect, transitory experiences of the mundane
reality that the poet shares with his readers.

Like his acknowledged master, Hardy, Larkin roots his poems deeply in the world of
time, and documents its effects on us. For Keats's images of pastoral detachment
and transcendent ecstasy, he substitutes material sights and sounds: sixty-watt

bulbs, jabbering (TV) sets, tin advertisements, cheap suits, and man caught for
good or ill in the middle, laden with his "depreciating luggage." Given this extreme
difference in emphasis, it is remarkable that Larkin should have chosen to adopt
Keats's form for one of his poems; but what is more remarkable is the extent to
which he has both subtly answered the form's romantic challenges and made it
assume, with great vitality and appropriateness, a shape that expresses his own
values. A detailed comparison of the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "The Whitsun
Weddings" reveals the complexity of Larkin's revision.

The ode has traditionally been an atemporal form, tending to remove its subjects
from specific contexts of time and place, and to celebrate them in structures whose
organization is spatial or musical rather than temporal. The organization of Keats's
stanzas reinforces this characteristic. Such stanzas accord perfectly with Keats's
desire to present an ideal of beauty beyond the reach of time, and they condition us
to accept it through their own playing of a kind of timeless "music," "For ever piping
songs for ever new."

The Keatsian stanzas of "The Whitsun Weddings" underline that poem's thematic
concerns in an equally masterful way, but Larkin's structure is as different from
Keats's as his themes are. A succession of similarly rhymed stanzas (all
ababcdecde) leads the reader on an unbroken movement through time that mirrors
the narrator's progress on the train. The unfolding of this narrative action links the
stanzas into a tight sequence, and this effect is furthered by Larkin's characteristic
habit of running his stanzas into each other. As both narrator and newly married
couples are picked up and carried along on a fixed, timetabled journeyover whose
speed and direction they can exercise no controlso the reader is drawn by these
stanzas into a steady temporal progression. We become predisposed towards
viewing time as "our element," rather than as a frame that can be transcended.

The presence of a foreshortened line in each stanza would break this pattern if
Larkin used it as Keats did in the "Ode to Psyche" and "Ode to a Nightingale." But
where Keats introduced shorter lines towards the ends of his stanzas, which quicken
through this overturning of our expectations, Larkin shortens the second line of
every stanza. This burst of energy, offering the possibility of other directions, loses
itself in the seven pentameter lines that follow; its life is absorbed into the regular
flow of each stanza, soft sift in an hourglass. "A slow and stopping curve southwards
we kept": Larkin's stanzas direct us to the unrelenting flow of time as surely as
Keats's proclaim the remoteness of art from its course. (pp. 531-33)

Keats approaches the urn's supramundane essence through a mode of description

that, appropriately, abounds in unanswerable questions (seven in the first stanza)
and paradoxes; and the word "ever" sounds a constant leitmotif to remind us that
the urn or, by implication, art itself, does not essentially belong to our world of time.

"The Whitsun Weddings" roots us at once in time ("That Whitsun") and manifests a
concern with time ("I was late getting away"). Larkin sets the train in a context of
precise calculation ("One-twenty," "three-quarters-empty") appropriate to this
central symbol which is both poetically and literally a vehicle in motion rather than
a fixed mark. In opposition to the mysterious otherworldliness of Keats's first stanza,
Larkin's involves our senses in a situation: "we" feel the hotness of the cushions, are
blinded by the glare of windscreens, and smell the fish-dock. Soon a noise of
"whoops and skirls" appeals to yet another sense, in contrast to the silence of the
urn's unheard melodies. The train proceeds on its journey, advancing by means
more solid than Keats's questions and paradoxes: it picks up a cargo of
sympathetically observed human detailsuncles shouting smut, children frowning,
girls gripping their hand-bags tighter. These details represent what John Wain has
called a "connoisseurship of the particular," and they show how much this poet has
learned from the novelist he once was.

Larkin realizes, however, that we must pay a price for such full involvement in the
world of time: the urn exists in a perpetual morning, but the train moves gradually
from "short-shadowed cattle," past the "Long shadows" of poplars later in the
afternoon, until finally walls of blackened moss "Came close, and it was nearly
done." The wedding days are coming to an end, and the train's progress realizes the
full emotional ambiguity of a wordprominent in the titles of two earlier Larkin
poemsthat captures this mingling of happy beginnings and poignant endings:
departures. This poem's leitmotif consists not of "ever," but of words and phrases
that recall us to the ticking of the clock: "late," "hurry," "At first," "next time," "at
last," "in time," "long enough," "this hour."

Keats instead suggests, through a series of references to the supernatural, that the
urn's proper sphere is more divine than mortal. The constant renewal and
transcendent permanence of religion suggest and symbolize that of art.

Nothing like this overtly religious setting appears in Larkin's poem, even though its
title refers to both a holy day and a sacrament. Faithful to his own vision and the
values of his age, Larkin places us "out on the end of an event": his brides and

grooms emerge from cafs and banquet halls rather than from churches. "The
Whitsun Weddings" would seem to testify not only that art serves life, but that life
serves a time unquickened by transcendent impulses; and the contrast between this
view and that of the ode is so great that Larkin's poem would seem to share only a
rhyme scheme with Keats's. Near the end of the poem, however, we witness an
experience that transforms this impression.

In the last stanza of "The Whitsun Weddings," Larkin creates his version of the vital
moment of fulfillment at the center of the ode, where Keats conveyed an ecstatic
vision of ideal beauty. Larkin's dnouement is as much descriptive as visionary,
yet it does not lack intensity. Instead of being animated by the thought of
permanence, it gathers strength from "the power/That being changed can give." As
the train journey comes to an end, the poem fills with words that generate an image
of consummation: "loosed," "tightened," "took hold," "swelled," "sense of falling,"
"arrow-shower." But to pick out these words and list them is to distort the poem's
effect while trying to explain it: in its context, the sexual symbolism moves us
profoundly without calling attention to itself; it works as inconspicuously as Larkin's
syntax in the last sentence, which carries us effortlessly from literal brakes to
metaphorical rain:

We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
The train's entrance to the tunnel and arrival at its destination carries, ever so
gently, overtones of the most personal and lifegiving of human "arrivals." This
beautiful fulfillment resolves a slight element of suspense created by the poised
images of the previous stanza's landscape, where "An Odeon went past, a cooling
tower,/And someone running up to bowl." More important, it releases the "power" of
the marriages that the train has steadily taken on during the course of the
afternoon and informs that power with shape and purpose.

The connotations of this fulfillment are not only sexual. As one responds to the
swelling sense of falling that envelops the "dozen" couples "sitting side by side,"
one recalls with a sharp tender shock that these are Whitsun weddings; and the
recollection confirms one's feeling that another kind of consummation is also being
imaged here. The "power" that Larkin depicts in the final stanza is a profoundly

spiritual one, like the "power" bestowed on the apostles at Pentecost, after Christ
had been taken "out of their sight". That the poem should turn towards a religious
experience after portraying the wedding parties in overwhelmingly secular terms,
may be explained in part by Larkin's own conclusion in "Church Going":

someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground.
(pp. 533-36)
Keats conceives an absolute separation between the visionary and mundane
experiences. Larkin's vision is not one which fades, however, when we step back
into the world of time. Rather, it is a product of that world, and the structure of "The
Whitsun Weddings" underlines its nature by letting us experience it at the end of
the poemas a destination, not a flight.

Probably no other aspect of "The Whitsun Weddings" reflects more clearly the
extent to which Larkin has revised the romantic outlook of the "Ode on a Grecian
Urn." When Keats set stanzas 3 and 4 apart from the rest, even giving them a
different rhyme scheme, he emphasized the remoteness of the visionary moment
from the world around it. Larkin's final stanza moves through the same rhyme
scheme as all those before it; by making the stanzaic pattern that of the poem's
liberating vision he expresses a belief that the moment of fulfillment comes about
through time rather than in spite of it. Even though the short second line of each
stanza has subsumed its freedom and energy into a steady temporal progression, it
turns out that the latter movement brings "all the power" of the incomparably
greater sense of release which concludes the poem and informs its passengers.
Time has transfigured them. (pp. 536-37)

[The] whole experience depicted here, of arrival at a terminus, points to the most
irrevocable of "departures." All of these associations both qualify and accompany
the poem's vision of fulfillment. The last stanza unfolds as a moving elaboration of
an oxymoron formed earlier: "happy funeral." The poem brings us to an awareness
of time as simultaneously both a destructive and a creative force. The ecstasy of
Keats's "happy, happy boughs" is achievable, but such happiness is inseparable
from the recognition that the boughs do shed their leaves.

The magnitude of Larkin's revision of Keats may perhaps be best appreciated by

comparing it with one more widely celebrated. In the last stanza of "Sunday
Morning," Wallace Stevens echoes the ending of Keats's ode "To Autumn." The
great strength of Stevens' revision derives from its use of a similar landscape to
capture and convey a mood of mixed ripeness and decay that masterfully
approximates the mood of Keats's poem, even as Stevens varies the tone to
emphasize not so much the poignancy as the voluptuousness of the scene. Larkin
sets himself a still more formidable task. While Stevens chose to echo a poem that
expressed ideas rather close to his own, replaces the more typical romantic urge
towards transcendence with an acceptance of mutability that strikingly anticipates
Stevens' more modern view; but the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" embodies in every
respect the romantic viewpoint repudiated by both Stevens and Larkin. "The
Whitsun Weddings" is a revision in the fullest sense of the word, a critical second
look at the validity of an earlier approach.

One might ask what Larkin gains from formally associating his poem with Keats's
ode. Besides acting as a contrasting ground against which Larkin can define his own
position, the ode offers an ideal of ecstatic fulfillment for him to aim atand to
approach from a different direction. By leaving "All breathing human passion"
behind, the ode's central stanza arrived at one of the most perfect romantic
expressions of visionary joy; but "The Whitsun Weddings" shows how an acceptance
of the world abandoned by Keats can bring a profound spiritual fulfillment that
stands the test of comparison with Keats's. In Larkin's poem, joy is found in the
consummation of love rather than in an infinite postponement always "near the
goal" but never reaching it. In keeping with its leitmotif of temporal allusions
mentioned above, "The Whitsun Weddings" rejects both the ever ("For ever wilt thou
love") and the never ("never canst thou kiss") of Keats's poem; instead it accepts
without reservation the "changes" that time brings to its fresh couples. These
couples are living, breathing mortals ("I nearly died"), not marble men and maidens.
(pp. 538-39)

His art incorporates far more of that world than did Keats's exclusively "sylvan"
historian; yet the movement and details of "The Whitsun Weddings" revitalize
Keats's formwhat other modern poet has used it so successfully?as they criticize
its purpose. Larkin has shone new light on a traditional form, and in doing so, has
illuminated and probed some of the most moving experiences of contemporary life.
Far from selling poetry short [as some critics claim], such an approach redefines
and, for many readers, widens the boundaries of the art. (p. 540)

John Reibetanz, "'The Whitsun Weddings': Larkin's Reinterpretation of Time and

Form in Keats," in Contemporary Literature ( 1976 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Wisconsin System), Vol. 17, No. 4, Autumn, 1976, pp. 529-40.

Between The Less Deceived ([Philip Larkin's] first mature collection) and The
Whitsun Weddings there had been no essential change in either thematic material
or style. Yet, despite the success of The Whitsun Weddings, one wondered whether
Larkin could go on like this, working the same thin vein. How long could he make
poetry from the conviction that none of the choices of life is really preferable, that
all the ways one spends a life are not ways of living but "ways of slow dying"?
Already in The Whitsun Weddings a few of the poems had seemed a little too
familiar. Would not the problem become more severe now that there were even
more poems behind him? Without some major breakthrough, would not Larkin
become entrapped in sterile repetition and self-imitation? But what development
was possible? The very condition of Larkin's success was his rejection of most of the
materials of poetry, his conviction that there were only a few subjects worth talking
about and that these subjects might leave, in the words of one of his poems,
"nothing to be said."

A new collection, High Windows, has now appeared and it is at once exciting and
disappointing: exciting because Larkin, by viewing his familiar materials from a
slightly different perspective, has found a way to renew his poetry; disappointing
because that new perspective at times reveals a distasteful side, hitherto
concealed, to all Larkin's poetry. This new perspective may be described by the
words ritual and habit. Larkin's central theme has always been survival in a world
without value, a world with all coherence gone. His strength as a poet has been his
ability to confront this world and describe it without lament. Behind the modest
surface of his poems there was always an intellectual fearlessness. In High Windows
Larkin explores the ways in which ritual and repeated domestic events may give
some slight meaning and coherence to the world. In the best poems in this volume,
this sense of ritual exists side by side with Larkin's earlier, unflinching vision; in the
weaker ones, ritual becomes an escape and Larkin becomes nostalgic, launching
simplistic attacks on the commercial values of modern England and lamenting the
loss of the aristocratic and hierarchical values of merry old England. Fortunately, the
good poems in High Windows far outweigh the weak ones. (pp. 481-82)

In his overinsistence upon the commercialization of the modern world [as in "Show
Saturday"] Larkin betrays a hankering for an idealized past that is disappointing
after all those earlier poems in which he faced the empty present so courageously.
(p. 483)

[In the title poem] there is an implicit lament for those "Bonds and gestures" now
lost which once made life coherent. Instead of presenting this as positive doctrine,
Larkin crystallizes it in a beautiful and terrifying image:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
The pristine image comes as a shock after the brutal concreteness of the earlier
stanzas (a device Larkin has used successfully in the past). Those high windows
may indeed be part of an Anglican church but the image renders the emptiness of a
world without value-giving ritual in a way unattainable through explicit social
commentary.

The concern of High Windows with the survival of ritual is by no means a totally new
element in Larkin's poetry. In a sense, it has always been present as the obverse of
Larkin's conviction that all our individual hopes prepare the way for disappointment.
As early as the poem, "Church Going," he had predicted that the meaning of the
church and of the rituals it held, "marriage, and birth,/And death, and thoughts of
these," would never be completely lost. In the title poem of The Whitsun Weddings
Larkin handled these themes in a way which foreshadows "Show Saturday" and the
present volume generally. But in the earlier collections, the concern with the shared
experiences of life is a minor note and is balanced by the fear that death empties
even these moments of their meaning. In High Windows the poet, either with
increased confidence or in increased desperation, concentrates again and again on
the possibilities offered by vestigial ritual.

Through this concentration, Larkin escapes the mere repetition of his earlier
achievements. Indeed this new focus seems to free his imagination as he develops
an impressive series of strategies for exploring his ideas. In "To the Sea," the first
and one of the best poems in the volume, Larkin follows a format similar to that of
"The Whitsun Weddings," observing "the miniature gaiety of seasides" and
speculating

It may be that through habit these do best,

Coming to water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.
Through such habit, no matter how clumsy, the parts of life are drawn together once
more. In the first and third parts of the triptych, "Livings," and again in "The CardPlayers," historical vignettes are used to contrast the security of an habitual present
with the sort of cold, empty exterior seen through the high windows. In "Friday Night
in the Royal Station Hotel" the same contrast is made in a contemporary setting.
With a deceptive lightheartedness the same themes are developed in "Vers de
Socit" in terms of the unpleasant partying of social occasions. Even of these
trivial occasions the poet can ask:

Are, then, these routines

Playing at goodness, like going to church?

From poem to poem, Larkin shifts his angle of vision, presenting new sides of his
central concern. The result is a volume even stronger as a whole than as separate
poems.

Not all the poems in High Windows focus on these concerns but most of the best do
and where others appear, such as "The Old Fools" and "The Building," which harken
back more completely to earlier stances, they are made more interesting by the
juxtaposition. (pp. 484-86)

Stephen David Lavine, "Larkin's Supreme Versions," in The Michigan Quarterly

Review (copyright The University of Michigan, 1976), Fall, 1976, pp. 481-86.

Admittedly, Larkin's laconic, scaled-down, wryly pessimistic poems are not to

everyone's liking, and there are times when his determinedly plain style comes to
seem rather forced; but the achievement of such collections as The Whitsun
Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) is incontestable. I know people who can

quote passages from "Church Going" and "The Whitsun Weddings" with a zest that
would have astonished Dylan Thomas, and must now astonish those who believe
that poetry, in order to be loved, must celebrate rather than condemn, and must
strive to approximate music rather than to give us back, with very few distracting
flourishes, the rhythms and nuances of "ordinary" speech. (p. 38)

Willing himself to be unexceptional, taking for his own a provincial English

landscape writ painfully small, Larkin has created a number of nearly perfect poems
and two very interesting novels which address themselves to the question of what
to make of a "diminished thing" (to use Frost's helpful terminology). Larkin might
say that the "diminished thing" is life itself

What are days for?

Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
but an impartial observer might speculate that the true subject of Larkin's poetry
is England: the waning of English civilization: the paralysis of the spirit when it is
confronted by historical changes beyond its ability to gauge. In his preface to Jill
(1946), Larkin's first novel, he has said: "At an age when self-importance would
have been normal, events cut us ruthlessly down to size." Though he is speaking of
wartime England in this case, his sentiment holds true for present-day England, and
both Jill and A Girl in Winter will strike readers as absolutely contemporaryperhaps
even prophetic.

A Girl in Winter is a highly sensitive, rather meditative and slowly moving novel, a
work of deliberately modest proportions reminiscent of Virginia Woolf and the early
Elizabeth Bowen: a poet's novel, one might be inclined to say, in which a notextraordinary provincial town in the depths of winter is lovingly reconstructed.
Perhaps not lovingly: Larkin is never sentimental. But there is an unmistakable
pleasure in his descriptions of ugly old buildings and wan, joyless people and
crowded buses and insufferable dentists' offices and the futile, hopeful, and
ultimately doomed gestures people make toward one another. His heroine, a young
woman named Katherine Lind, shares with the Larkin of the poems a readiness to

accept limitations and even to welcome the frustration of desirea perverse

eagerness to celebrate the failure of the world's enchantment. It is not other people,
after all, who disappoint us, but rather our own foolish expectations: and so we are
better off when, like Katherine, we turn resolutely aside from the entanglements of
human emotion. We should make of the deadening winter an ally, and see in its
relentless chill our own icy souls. (pp. 38-9)

The novel's central weakness lies in its characters, who are so without motivation
and purpose that one finds it difficult to care very much for them. Katherine Lind is
shadowy and vaporous, lacking distinctive features. Unless the young woman is a
zombie, or a near-catatonic, her failure to think or feel anything is quite improbable.

It is possible, of course, to read A Girl in Winter as a prose-poem in which nothing

happens, and to insubstantial people, because such is the nature of life in the 20th
century in England. Larkin has the ability to evoke, in a few bleak images, a sense of
waste and disillusion and emptiness that is as profound as the similarly barren
vision of Beckett; but one might argue that so minimal a vision is perhaps best
rendered in non-naturalistic terms, in parody or absurdist drama or in brief poems.
The fleshing-out of a novel requires human blood and warmth, the interplay of
personalities, the possibility of change and surprise. At the conclusion of "Church
Going" the poet concludes that "the place was not worth stopping for" and
whether this cynical observation strikes the reader as true or nota place not worth
stopping for is best investigated, if investigated at all, as quickly as possible.

The negation of feeling so brilliantly dramatized in Larkin's poetry stimulates the

reader to believe that here, at last, in these drab merciless terms, is life driven into
a comer and justly assessed: less is not more, surely, but it is at least more truthful
? Yet the conviction is a false one. Larkin's studied nihilism is as florid in its way as
the too-generous affirmation of a Whitman, and there is no reason to think that
there is more "truth" in diminished things than there is in inflated things: for the
poet expresses his interior landscape primarily. [It] does not seem surprising that
Larkin himself never attempted another work of fiction. "Novels are about other
people," he has said, "and poetry is about yourself." One might amend that to allow
for the probability of his poetry being about his nation, his culture, his heritage:
which accounts for the enthusiasm with which his poetry is always received in an
England ready to believe that it has been at last cut down "ruthlessly" to size. (pp.
39-40)

Joyce Carol Oates, in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New
Republic; 1976 by The New Republic, Inc.), November 20, 1976.

Larkinolatry is an easy condition to succumb to; I have suffered bouts of it myself.

During a time in which so many English poets have assumed American mannerisms,
Larkin's style has remained stubbornly indigenous. His poems have not been made
for export; his achievement, his attitudes, and his deliberation in pursuing a career
out of the public eye, all have for us the charm of unfamiliarity. Formal perfection
has not been foremost among our poets' concerns since the middle fifties; a poet
like Richard Wilbur, who has not significantly altered his style since then, seems an
astonishing survivor halfway through the seventies. Larkin has the same sort of
tenacity, maintaining standards of craftsmanship whose rigour seems enhanced by
an infrequency of publication. One book every decade, a pile of mature poems
numbering less than a hundredwhat American poet over fifty has been as
scrupulous an editor of himself as Larkin has been? If the finish and relative scarcity
of these poems seem alien to us, the world view many of them express is even
more so. Thoroughgoing pessimism in the manner of Hardy has generally seemed
unadaptable to American minds. If an all-embracing pessimism were to appear
again in American poetry (and perhaps it may, in response to our Asian empire's
dissolution) I expect it would be a noisier, more histrionic attitude than it is in
Larkin's handling of it. The surfaces of his poems are so quiet, the depths of the
best so profound, that one might reread them for a lifetime without having distilled
their last drop of melancholy.

The bleakness of Larkin's vision, present in his writing from the beginning, has
intensified through time. The almost bottomless bitterness expressed in some of the
pieces in High Windows may be taken, depending on one's taste, as signalling either
the perfecting of an artist's individual focus or the surrender of his imaginative
flexibility. High Windows, like Larkin's other mature collections, is a problematical
achievement, and is more readily assessed after a glance back upon its
predecessors.

The early verse collected in The North Ship (1945) has almost nothing of the poet's
characteristic voice. The poems, as Larkin notes disarmingly in a preface written
twenty years after their original publication, are mostly mouthpieces for the 'potent
music, pervasive as garlic' of the middle Yeats. Moonlight, drumtaps, and ominous
horsemen are frequently and floridly introduced. What now seems prophetic in
these pieces is the recurrent appearance in them of the theme of loneliness as a
fact of life, a given, against which any struggle can only end in exhausted defeat.
(pp. 100-01)

The maturing of his gift was evident in his prose earlier than in his poetry. Jill (1946)
and A Girl in Winter (1947) are admirable novels, authoritative in style without
borrowing any other writer's rhetoricaltogether remarkable productions for a
novelist under twenty-five. Both written in the third person, they pursue the theme
of loneliness with a satisfying blend of earnestness and amusement, detachment
and sympathy. In the traumas suffered by the protagonists of these novels we see
vivid anticipations of the disillusionment to be voiced in the later poems. (pp. 10102)

I wonder if Larkin will not in the end come to be esteemed as much for his novels
especially A Girl in Winteras for his verse. The persistence of his single prevailing
theme allows us to tally the relative advantages each genre has tendered him. The
novels are rich in circumstantial detail, in clear, true-coloured depictions of settings
(Kemp's Oxford, Katherine's unnamed provincial city) which provide a telling depth
to the emotional experience of the characters who inhabit them. In the poems some
of this descriptive density has necessarily been sacrificed; and there is, in a deeper
sense, less background supplied. The speaker in the poems, whether observing
others or himself, spends little time examining the reasons for a malaise which he
views as all-pervasive. There is no explaining why the vessels in the 'sparkling
armada of promises' we see approaching us never drop anchor. We have picked up
'bad habits of expectancy', the poem tells us. There is no positing of causes, no
attempt to trace unhappy effects meaningfully back to a source. The powerful,
blank absoluteness of [his] pronouncements goes beyond anything in the novels.
John Kemp's experience of class prejudice, and Katherine's of exile, are credible as
provocations of their emotional disorders. The novels partake of a larger, less
subjective view of life than the poems attempt or desire to assume. The Less
Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings lose something in breadth as they reduce to
an eloquent, personalized shorthand the estrangement that is adumbrated in
Larkin's fictional prose.

Yet Larkin's poetic material remains more novelistic (to speak of the novel in its
classic form) than any other contemporary poet's. The poems frequently present life
histories condensed and calcified. Plot and character are dominant elements,
however Larkin's mastery of verse technique may enhance the total effect of a
poem. One feels that a century ago he might have been a brother in arms of
Dickens or Trollope, rivalling them in his cunning exploitation of the unconscious, at
times grotesque comedy of which humanity is capable. 'Mr Bleaney', 'Dockery and
Son'these are Dickensian names, Dickensian titles. (The name Dockery appears,
offhandedly, in Jilla sign that Larkin's imagination was very early attracted to a

traditionally English [or at least Victorian] poetry of proper names.) Of the poems in
his first two mature volumes one's initial question might be: do they successfully
realize their narrative impulse within the confines of verse?

In some cases yes, in others no. There are times at which one feels that the dooms
of Larkin's characters have been unduly and insistently contrived. At their least
convincing the poems recall Hardy's Satires of Circumstance, which lead one to
reflect that it is not the Unknown God who has dealt such a miserable hand to the
hapless folk involved, but Mr Hardy himself. Recurrently annoying is the busy stagemanaging by which Larkin will lull the reader into a false security only to pull the rug
out from under him in a last stanza, or a last line. (pp. 102-04)

The finest work occurs when argument is consistently carried through not by
didactic statement but by a wondrously expressive imagery or scenic description
as in the title poems, 'The Less Deceived' and 'The Whitsun Weddings'.

The tone throughout [High Windows] is consistent and convincing, without the
selfconscious drops into didacticism or defensiveness that at times discountenanced
the earlier poems. The pieces expounding Larkin's brand of pessimism have become
less stagy; it is as if he has fully grown into an attitude which in a younger man had
the appearance of being overly willed. (p. 106)

There are two things before which Larkin will relax his toughly critical stance: the
beauty of nature and what might be called democratic social rituals. For these
subjects he reserves his gentlest tones: the earlier pastorals, 'At Grass' and
'Wedding-Wind', and the brilliant panoramas, 'Here' and 'The Whitsun Weddings' are
notable instances of this benignity. Nature is celebrated in two small, impeccable
lyrics in the new book, 'The Trees' and 'Cut Grass'. The more considerable poems 'To
the Sea' and 'Show Saturday' offer engaging pictures of, respectively, a seaside
resort and a rural fair. The poet observes the zest and resilient traditionalism of
common people on holiday: 'Still going on, all of it, still going on!' he exclaims with
delighted wonder in 'To the Sea'. Perhaps because he is so sparing of affirmations,
Larkin's moments of expansiveness seem totally felt, and are as moving as they are
rare.

Expansiveness of a different sort is operative in the book's title poem and its last
piece, 'The Explosion'. One sees in these how Larkin has got beyond reliance on the

nervous, over-determined climaxes criticized above. It is not that his treatment has
become optimisticthe content of both these poems is vividly sad. But Larkin has
provided each with a startling final image, which points beyond all emotion, whether
of joy or grief. The marvellous close of 'The Whitsun Weddings' may have provided
the cue for this tactic: there, the poet crowns his catalogue of the sights and sounds
of his train journey with [a] vault into featureless, inscrutable distance. In 'High
Windows', the envy of age for youth, and the supposed pleasures envied, are alike
transcended and reproved by a stark conclusion which comes out of nowhere and
yet seems perfectly in place. This chilling mixture of numbness and exaltation has
few counterparts in poetry of our own or any time; this is one of Larkin's finest and
most unusual poems. On the level of meaning his latest work is as austere and
uncompromising as ever, but it is subtler in structure, and more flexible in the
means by which it makes a difficult, unappealing view of life accessible to the
common reader. Instead of being led down corridors to come up against a locked
door, we find the door swinging giddily open on to an absolute void. The effect is at
once appalling and exhilarating. (pp. 107-09)

Robert B. Shaw, "Philip Larkin: A Stateside View," in Poetry Nation ( Poetry Nation
1976), No. 6, 1976, pp. 100-09.

Philip Larkin, like Tennyson, has the power to make poetry out of material that might
seem to be unpromising and intractable. Most of us live in urban or suburban
landscapes among the constructions and the detritus of an industrial society. Larkin
distills poetry from the appurtenances of this societyan Odeon cinema,
advertisement hoardings [British billboards], scrap heaps of disused cars, hospital
waiting rooms, cut-price storeswhich he presents without falsification or
sentimentality. And, again like Tennyson, he delineates with considerable force and
delicacy the pattern of contemporary sensibility, tracing the way in which we
respond to our environment, plotting the ebb and flow of the emotional flux within
us, embodying in his poetry attitudes of heart and mind that seem peculiarly
characteristic of our time: doubt, insecurity, boredom, aimlessness, and malaise. (p.
131)

Larkin is, like Tennyson, an artist of the first rank, who employs language with a rare
freshness, precision, and resonance, and whose verse records with lyrical purity his
experience of loneliness and anguish. He is both the unofficial laureate of post-war
Britian and the poet who voices most articulately and poignantly the spiritual
desolation of a world in which men have shed the last rags of religious faith that
once lent meaning and hope to human lives. (p. 132)

The 1966 edition of The North Ship is a reprint of the 1945 edition, plus one poem,
numbered "XXXII," of which Larkin writes: "As a coda I have added a poem, written
a year or so later, which, though not noticeably better than the rest, shows the
Celtic fever abated and the patient sleeping soundly." The first stanza of this poem
leads us at once into a world far removed from the artificial, literary stage set of The
North Ship:

Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair,

I looked down at the empty hotel yard
Once meant for coaches. Cobblestones were wet,
But sent no light back to the loaded sky,
Sunk as it was with mist down to the roofs.
Drainpipes and fire-escape climbed up
Past rooms still burning their electric light:
I thought: Featureless morning, featureless night.
Already in this stanza we can observe many of the hallmarks of Larkin's mature
poetry: the ability to evoke not only the specific appearances of things but the
atmosphere that surrounds them; the power of discovering poetry in objects or in
situations that most people would regard as dull or unremarkable; a rare skill in
making slight, unobtrusive departures from the dominant metrical patternthe last
line deviates from the expected beat of the iambic pentameter and, despite its
irregularity, paradoxically conveys the impression of weariness and monotony: "I
thought: Featureless morning, featureless night."

It is instructive to compare this poem with Poem XX from The North Ship, which
begins, "I see a girl dragged by the wrists/Across a dazzling field of snow," and
speedily moves on to the contemplation of the poet as "a sack of meal upon two
sticks," and of "two old ragged men," before concluding with an "image of a snowwhite unicorn." The girl exists merely as a prologue to a brilliant evocation of
Yeatsian cadences and personae.

The theme of poem "XXXII" is also Yeatsian in its speculation about the poet's being
forced to choose between the Muse and the mortal girl, but although there is no

description of her physical or emotional characteristics, we are convinced that, like

the young lady in the photograph album, "this is a real girl in a real place." It is not
easy to determine to what extent the poem reflects Larkin's newly-born admiration
for Hardy. The diction and the tone are quite unlike Hardy, and indeed Larkin seldom
imitates or verbally echoes him. Yet he is present in the poem, even though we
cannot locate him precisely, for as Larkin himself remarked, "Hardy taught me to
feel rather than to write." From 1946 onward Larkin has remained faithful to the
belief that poetry can be made out of any situation or incident, however odd or
trivial, that genuinely stirs the poet. Conversely, he must write only about those
matters that move or excite him and not about subjects that he feels ought to form
the themes of his poetry. This belief Larkin owes in part to his study of Hardy. (pp.
134-35)

The awareness of suffering and the brooding spirit of compassion that inform so
much of Hardy's poetry are widely diffused throughout The Less Deceived. I believe
also that there is a close kinship between the emotional pattern of this collection
and the complex attitude of mind delineated by Hardy in the Apology, dated
February 1922, with which he prefaced Late Lyrics and Earlier. Poems such as
"Deceptions" and "Myxomatosis" embody Hardy's desire that "pain to all upon [the
globe], tongued or dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum by loving-kindness."
And the best introduction to "Church Going," the most celebrated poem in The Less
Deceived, is Hardy's Apology, with its conviction that "Poetry and religion touch
each other, or rather modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different
names for the same thing." Although Larkin has remarked of "Church Going" that its
tone and argument are entirely secular, the power of this poem is largely generated
by the tension between the ironical mistrust of orthodox Christianity expressed by
the poet and his intuitive reverence for the church as a place where our intimations
of mystery and destiny are enshrined. Hardy, despite his atheism, regarded
himself as a "churchy" man, and in the Apology acknowledges the potentialities of
the Anglican Church. Although Larkin is, like Hardy, an unbeliever, he suggests in
"Church Going" that "this accoutred frowsty barn" of a church will continue to be
worthy of respect. (p. 138)

If The Less Deceived can be called Tennysonian because of the notes of lyrical
intensity, loneliness, and longing that resound so plangently in its pages, The
Whitsun Weddings (1964) reveals the other side of the Tennysonian medal on which
the lineaments of contemporary England are depicted. Larkin evokes for us, in
poem after poem, the postwar English landscape, rural, urban, and suburban; and
his verse takes on the central, representative character that marks the poems of
Tennyson in the years after 1850 and of Auden in the late 1920s and throughout the
1930s. (p. 139)

Whereas T. S. Eliot regards the modern world with horror and catalogues, with a
mixture of disdain and disgust, golfballs, abortifacient pills, women's underwear,
false teeth, cigarette ends, and "other testimony of summer nights," Larkin is
moved to a wry tenderness. Even the enormous hoardings that most of us find so
distasteful awaken in Larkin a rueful compassion, since he sees them as the media
whereby the urban masses are led to contemplate ideal Forms in the Platonic sense,
(although they are deluding Forms). The title of the poem, "Essential Beauty," in
Whitsun Weddings is not entirely ironical: the figures on the hoardings transport
simple people into a pure, otherworldly realm, and in an age when the Christian
pantheon has lost its power to comfort and uphold, they may bring a kind of
consolation to those on their deathbed. (pp. 139-40)

The volume's title poem, "The Whitsun Weddings," evokes a series of impressionist
pictures that capture the appearance and the atmosphere of our heavily urbanized
landscape. Larkin manages to combine a curt exactness with a Tennysonian
delicacy and amplitude. Larkin's eye is acute and unsentimental; his portrayal of
the wedding guests clustered on the railway station platforms is so accurate that it
verges on cruelty. Yet these rather coarse, ridiculous figures are aware that
marriage, like birth and death, has a sacred quality. And as the train approaches
London the poet feels that in some mysterious way the Waste Land of the
metropolis is fertilized not by a dying god or a mythical redeemer, but by the newly
married couples sitting in the railway carriages. (pp. 140-41)

High Windows contains more overt comment on the state of England than any of
Larkin's previous volumes. Twenty years earlier he had remarked that "the impulse
to preserve lies at the bottom of all art," and such an impulse colors his entire
political and social philosophy, which is profoundly conservative and pessimistic.
Larkin's feeling for tradition and continuity is very strong: one of the most beautiful
poems from The Whitsun Weddings, "MCMXIV," is an elegy for those who rushed to
volunteer at the outbreak of the First World War, and for a vanished England;
another poem from that volume, "Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses,"
flays a literary intellectual who despises the London crowds on Armistice Day. (p.
141)

"Homage to a Government," written in 1969 and included, like "Going, Going," in

High Windows, has angered some readers by its reactionary sentiments. Just as
"MCMXIV" is a lament for lost innocence, "Homage to a Government" is a lament for
a sense of responsibility submerged beneath a tide of materialism. It is a mark of

Larkin's superb technical skill that in "Homage to a Government" he can make a

virtue of monotony and give tonelessness a strong flavor. (p. 142)

The poems on public themes in High Windows are counterbalanced by poems that
evoke a world transcending the contingencies and imperfection of daily existence.
Larkin has always been aware of such a world, which corresponds to the needs of
human loneliness and longing, and whose nature can be hinted at by the medium of
images drawn from the inexhaustible realm of naturesun, moon, water, sky,
clouds, distance. (p. 143)

[Although Larkin] has repeatedly deplored the post-Symbolist revolution

inaugurated by Eliot and Ezra Pound, [there is] a quality that has been present in his
poetry from the very start, a quality that manifests itself in High Windows with an
intensity of feeling and of utterance fiercer than Larkin has ever previously attained.
The language takes on at times a concentration and density so intricate and
compressed that they incur the charge of obscurity, a vice strongly reprehended by
Larkin in twentieth-century poetry:

By night, snow swerves

(O loose moth world)
Through the stare travelling
Leather-black waters.
This kind of concentrated Iyrical purity coexists in certain poems with vulgarisms
and obscenities that have become more frequent and more coarse with every
successive volume. There are precedents for this in modern English verse. Eliot's
"Sweeney Among the Nightingales" foreshadows the strategy, though not the
vocabulary, of Larkin's more outspoken poems; and Yeats shocked some of his older
admirers with his Crazy Jane sequence and with Last Poems (Larkin still owes more
to the rhetoric of his first master than he may care to admit). The collocation of
musical intensity and poignant longing with the employment of four-letter words
more commonly found in taprooms and barracks than in poems occurs in several
places in High Windows. The title poem opens with a brutal reflection on youthful
sexuality, but ends in a meditation that transcends the impulses of sweating
carnality. The title of another poem, "Sad Steps," lulls us into a mood of high
romance where Sir Philip Sidney looks questioningly at the heavens: "With how sad
steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!" We are in for a shock:

Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.
Then, after a precise delineation of the cloudy sky through which the moon dashes,
the poem modulates into a series of invocations that might be the climax of a
Symbolist poem, were it not for the irony underlying the apostrophes. The moon
shifts again, the rhetoric is dispersed, and the poem ends with a bare statement
that, like so many of Larkin's closing lines, strikes home with unerring accuracy and
gravity:

One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain

Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
I began this essay by suggesting that Larkin is, like Tennyson, at once the public
laureate of contemporary England and the solitary poet of human isolation, fear,
and longing. One poem in High Windows, "The Trees," is more reminiscent of
Tennyson than anything else that Larkin has written. This is partly because it
employs the metrical and stanzaic form of In Memoriam, but mainly because it
recalls and re-creates the older poet's extraordinary responsiveness to the
emotional significance no less than to the sensuous properties of the English
landscape. (pp. 143-45)

We find in Larkin as in Tennyson an awareness of the way in which the utter

perfection and abundance of the natural world accentuate our sense of its mortality
as well as of our own. The whole poem is so perfectly ordered that it is unrewarding
to point out individual felicities, but it is worth drawing attention to the consummate
artistry and deep awareness of complex emotions displayed in the last line. The
word afresh normally evokes images of greenness and of hope. So it does here; but
Larkin somehow contrives to suggest that sadness and transience are mingled with

joy and affirmation. The effect is akin to that achieved at times by Mozart and
Schubert at their most tender and poignant:

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
(pp. 145-46)