Why does Veeky Forums fear the work of Philip Larkin?

I always think this one's quite appropriate for Veeky Forums:

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

Christ...

lol Larkin is definitely the Official Poet of Veeky Forums

Best Society
--------------------

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired - though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it's just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

>"FUCK YOU DAD" the poem
I read this a while ago and hated it, glad to know who wrote it

He's just simply not a good poet. He reads like a failed novelist
A mere green text poster before his time

fuck off, Larkin is the bitter Robert Frost

>not a good poet

What are you talking about?

He is certainly one of the top ten writing in English in the 20th century.

Exactly, the Virgin Larkin and the Chad Frost

lmao at your life

being a silver medalist Robert Frost means you're a titan.

Like Chekhov he's gloomy, but unlike Chekhov he offers no reason for cheer, and that's his obscurity.

Stop posting that terrible example.

The man knew how to write a poem.

Because he is truthful.

I haven't read much poetry myself but, having read most poems posted above, I tend to agree. He wallows in dusty banality and whines that's all there is to it. He props himself up on his metre and goes on yapping and it kind of sounds like poetry from afar. The little I've read says nothing new (forgivable, perhaps impossible) in no new way (his one job).

"Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
From above. How do you think this says nothing new in no new way?

Honestly, most of his lines are prosaic. He usually saves the actually poetic stuff for the end. That's just his style. But he does deliver... "Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf" is phenomenal. The above quoted is phenomenal.
And who doesn't like this:

"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."

Eliot
Yeats
Pound
Stevens
Crane
Auden
Bishop
Lowell
J.Merrill
Ashbery

ten 20C english-lang poets who are leagues beyond larkin

H.D.
Moore
WCW
L.Hughes
K.Douglas
Thomas
Frost
Berryman
Heaney
Hill

ten more in case you're still not sure

bloomfag

holy fuck, this guy was a UK poet? He’s as obtuse as an American

red herring. those writers are objectively richer than larpman

Yeah I wasn't familiar with him and assumed these were the work of an American too

>richer
the bloomfag terminology continues

i would say larkin is better than langston hughes and berryman. i like him a lot more than h.d. though I'm not sure he's better. wouldn't say that a lot of those are "leagues beyond larkin" though

also anyone who thinks larkin is "not a good poet" is just objectively wrong anyway. top ten poets in english for the 20th century is overselling him for sure, but he's so far past the hedgerow demarcating "good" that anyone disagreeing needs to pay more attention

pay more attention to what? there's nothing there but alcoholism, sexual bitterness, and nostalgia for prewar britain. you're the one who's claiming he's good enough to be numbered on some list of the greatest. why don't you provide a critical reading of his poetry, instead of quoting a few stanzas and blithely remarking, "who doesn't like this??"

let me guess, you're 19 fresh out of high school. i had a larkin phase in that period. i got over it in a year or two.

Nothing new, unsubtly. He does rely indeed on his punchlines, some of which I kind of like, for instance the giant palm of solitude and the sun comprehending glass, but it's too little. Is it too much to ask to read poems made out of mostly "actually poetic stuff" instead of down and feathers he should have filled his diary with, desu? Not even his best that he keeps saving for last is that good; it's often diluted; there's always some filler or other. He's got his metre figured all right and is on the prowl for syllables and words. I'm too lazy to type more on my sorry cellphone so as to exemplify. I remain little impressed by the little poetic craft I see and mostly at odds with the general sentiment of his poetry. I'm probably so unwilling to forgive the former because I'm put off by the latter.

>haha let the human race die out lol
How gay can you be?

first, i wouldn't rank him personally in the top 30 or whatever greatest english poets. he's not a favorite of mine.

second, you're acting like nobody likes larkin but bitter adolescents, which is not true. several of the writers you name like larkin. larkin doesn't even really have a controversial reputation (the way that say, allen ginsberg does) among serious poetry readers and poets. he has people who don't like him, but his reputation has never really been in question, so I don't know why you are acting like only people fresh out of high school could possibly find him interesting

third, lets talk about high windows. just the stuff leading up to the end. i can't convince you it's good, that's impossible. i can only point. but i don't see how you could see only "alcoholism, sexual bitterness, and nostalgia for prewar britain" in the last stanza. throughout the poem larkin has been chatty, rude, colloquial. but then, "rather than words", comes a thought (signaling the tonal shift from arrogant bitterness etc. to a kind of reverence) of high windows.

the image of high windows is very strange. i don't like trying to explain it because it has so many symbolic associations that it's hard to pin down. here's one way of looking at it: the high windows, because high, because glass. and because they appear just after the mention of a priest, seem to have a transcendent significance, especially because they are "sun-comprehending" (strange phrase)... which seems to, literally speaking, suggest that they are lit. high windows being lit is actually a typical image of a late afternoon (well before sunset probably) (when the sunbeams become more horizontal is when you will notice lit high windows). sunset fits with the bitterness at the passage of time that you've seen earlier, but now it's not so local, it's a kind of spiritual decline that is captured knowingly (comprehendingly) in the windows capture of the sun as it is going down. but the sun doesn't go down forever, it comes back up. the changes larkin was talking about for the first few stanzas are placed, by the symbolic associations of his image, into a larger cycle or rises and falls.

then you have the deep blue beyond, that eradicates even that. it has no beginning, no end. it's a kind of death image... absolute endless nothingness, but because it's really also an image of a clear blue sky (a positive thing) it doesn't appear as a negative. unlike the glass, it doesn't show us a cycle of rise and fall, it doesn't comprehend anything. it's beyond the high windows because it's a further truth. the high windows themselves were a further truth from the observations of the first stanzas, but the blue beyond is a further truth even from that. but neither is negative. the closest image i can think of to the blue beyond is actually the image in leopardi's l'infinito

This lonely hill was always dear to me,
and this hedgerow, which cuts off the view
of so much of the last horizon.
But sitting here and gazing, I can see
beyond, in my mind’s eye, unending spaces,
and superhuman silences, and depthless calm,
till what I feel
is almost fear. And when I hear
the wind stir in these branches, I begin
comparing that endless stillness with this noise:
and the eternal comes to mind,
and the dead seasons, and the present
living one, and how it sounds.
So my mind sinks in this immensity:
and foundering is sweet in such a sea.

and maybe this all seems like nonsense. but I don't think it is. I think the image of the high windows is great because it is literally, physically something we can imagine, but also carries rich associations. this is just typical symbolist magic. it's classically great poetry. you've never crafted an image that good in your life, and 99.999% of people never will. it's worth a thousand pages of simple pretty pictures of scenery, and it makes larkin a good poet. not to mention that he made images of quality fairly consistently.

My favorite Larkin:

Too grim's the North,
Too soft the South,
The East's a damp forgotten place,
The West a dull backwater waste,
Wales, why ask? It's as bleak as ever,
Scotland too and worse the weather,
There are islands yes but they're no fun,
And Northern Ireland gets no sun,
It seems there's no place on this isle,
Which might inspire a contented smile,
So I'll close the curtains on all that,
And overturn my Welcome mat.

What did he mean by the combine harvester line?

To my mind it suggests the passage of time in cycles of obsolescence- ie the combine harvester replaced multiple generations of agricultural implements, and is itself not outdated. Plus the movement of a combine harvester is itself cyclical, as is its function (chopping the wheat at harvest time for it to grow again).

Dunno though, just guessing.

Vulgar and obscene poetry should be burned.

What a degenerate imbecile

OK, people often ask about the combine-harvester in this poem.

In fact there is (or used to be) a YouTube video of Andrew Motion (a minor poet who knew Larkin) giving a lecture on him and he says he's puzzled by it too.

This really is sad because it just shows how people HAVE NO CLUE WHAT LARKIN IS TALKING ABOUT.

OK, here is what is going on.

Larkin was born and grew up in England which was still quite Christian and restrained - for example people would NOT have sex before marriage, as a rule, and they would look down on those who did.

Then the 1960s came along and everyone threw "restraint" out of the window and went around gleefully saying how wonderful it was to get rid of all those old outmoded hang-ups and just have fun.

Larkin talks about this a LOT and if you read ALL his poems it's easy to get a feel for his general outlook. (Most famous is the poem beginning "Sexual Intercourse began in 1963".)

Basically Larkin was fairly sour about it all, and not just because he was too old and shy and ugly to take advantage of it and have lots of sex with young girls.

He understood very well that unfettered hedonism is not, in fact, quite as wonderful as the hippies thought, and there is a price to pay.

Now, Larkin throughout his work uses the idea of the countryside to symbolize the "old traditions" which are gradually being eaten up by modernity and so-called "progress".

(See "Going, Going" for a really explicit example of this).

So when he uses the combine-harvester, he is saying, old-fashioned sexual morality is being pushed aside the way that the traditional countryside ways of life are being pushed aside by increased urbanization.

And he doesn't think much of any of it.

The reason people don't see this is because this attitude is so far from their own.

(Larkin was, of course, completely right, but I won't be able to convince anyone of that.)

retard

But combine harversters are relatively modern. There are many other traditional farming allusions he could of done (*have made).

It is certainly true that Larkin does (almost) always start off very prosaically and only really get "poetic" towards the end - possibly in the last line or two.

There's an interesting comment Larkin himself made in one of his letters where he acknowledges this.

His poem "Whitsun Weddings" (which is a must-read) was going to be read out on the radio or TV and he's giving suggestions to the person who is going to read it.

And he basically says, the whole point of the poem is to prepare for the last two lines. The whole thing achieves lift-off in those two lines, and you have to really nail them.

He says that this is a bit of a fault, and it would be better if the intensity and grandeur and universality were increased more gradually, but that's just the way the poem turned out, and he can't do anything about it.

So I do agree, people who notice this are not being unreasonable. I just don't think it stops Larkin being really good.

That's the point bruh

He says "outdated combine harvester", so this is clearly what he means.

He couldn't use a really old farming allusion, like a horse-drawn plough or something, because those *had already gone*.

Larkin always keeps things as direct and literal and down-to-earth as possible.

He always relies on what his readers will see all around them.

What his audience would have been actually familiar with was older-style combine-harvesters actually being replaced by newer models all around them.

Daily reminder that Larkin was a sick, sick man.

>"And light is shed on more tawdry parts of his inner world. As well as the knickers, there are books with titles like The Rod and The Whip, rude doodles found drawn inside books, and pornography. he did find some stuff which is top shelf material, shall we say," Farthing says. "So we've put it on the top shelf and just drawn attention to it with a fairly innocent pair of pink knickers. The more perverse material isn't actually legal to have on display at the present time."

OK, we have some overlap for sure but I think the Atlantic ocean is always going to keep our lists separate (I'm English).

I'm not as familiar with all your names as I should be, but I've read them all, and they don't push Larkin out of my top ten.

I think it's interesting you would cite all these and not find room in your heart for Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves or Ted Hughes. (Crow is the single work of poetry I would keep from the 20th century BTW).

If "Thomas" is Dylan, then I concur.

>We live in a Godless empty world but at least we get to have secks in the butt! xD

Its Rick and Morty tier

bait

This is a fair criticism.

Larkin does OCCASIONALLY have some glimpses of light, but not many.

(The Whitsun Weddings, for example - he's a single man sitting alone in a train, but even though HE is never going to get married and have a family and basically enjoy life, he can see other people doing this, and applaud them, and enjoy it vicariously, if only for a short while.)

But he is sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge this fault in himself. This means he conveys an honest and healthy picture of the world even though he himself is sick and distorted.

The best example of this clear-eyed self-awareness is in an early poem which begins

"I see a girl dragged by the wrists
Across a dazzling field of snow..."

where he basically says, wow, look at that bloke with his girlfriend, they are really having fun, I wish I could be like that, but I can't, so the best I can do is just write poems as good as I can and hope to achieve some happiness that way, haha :)

Or e.g. in the Poem "Send No Money Now" he says that he has always stood to one side and *watched* life rather than participating in it.

Many other examples.

>"I see a girl dragged by the wrists
>Across a dazzling field of snow..."

Sounds problematic desu

I liked this, thanks for sharing

I've legit seen rappers with better verses than this.

...

The girl is laughing. Read the poem.

Wow, um, no thanks sweetie. (pls don't tell me what to do)

Imagine being this smug that you believe this is a good close reading and other anons are just too dumb and obstinate to see it

Got High Windows for Christmas. Great collection.

See The point could be exactly that- a succession of tools, each made obsolete by the next.