Like Philip Larkin in 1955, I was asked to write a short statement on my poetry for an anthology at what I rather hope was an early stage of my writing career – in my case for New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011). This was a task less close to Larkin’s than it might at first appear: Larkin had no idea his ‘Statement’ for Poets of the 1950s would be printed in its submitted form, whereas I was all too aware that mine would be, and fretted over it with farcical fastidiousness, rather too concerned that anything foolish I said might come back to haunt me.
 |
| Rory Waterman’s first collection is forthcoming with Carcanet. He was born in Belfast but grew up mostly in England, where he still lives. He co-edits New Walk, an international magazine for literature and the arts. |
In 1983, when his reputation as one of our most significant post-war writers was fairly secure, Larkin allowed his ‘Statement’ to be reprinted in Required Writing, but included a footnote making clear that he had initially submitted it on the assumption that it would be no more than ‘raw material for an introduction’ to be written by D. J. Enright, the editor of the 1950s book, and was ‘rather dashed’ to find it instead printed there verbatim.
Such details get forgotten when certain modern critics grind their axes. Indeed, parts of the ‘Statement’ have been taken by some as evidence, straight from the horse’s mouth, of painful narrow-mindedness and lowered artistic ambition. But I don’t think Larkin meant much of what he said there – not wholly, anyway.
 |
| Poetry by Rory Waterman is published in the bestselling New Poetries V (Carcanet, 2011) Get 25% off this and other titles in our Christmas Promotion! |
I am reminded of something he said about the inspiration for his great poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: ‘It was just a transcription of a very happy afternoon. I didn’t change a thing, it was just there to be written down’. This just isn’t true, and if it were true the poem would be nothing but a vivid diary entry. Larkin’s method of composition was often to spend a long time rewriting the same poem, occasionally dropping it for months or even years before resuming, as the thoughts proliferated and could be harnessed and moulded. It is this drawn-out process of development that led to the creation of the seemingly effortless ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, for instance – which was started several years before it was completed.
More was going on than the simple preservation of what had been seen and thought and felt on a train one sunny Whitsun: the thinking and feeling were on-going preoccupations that enabled an idea to become a poem independent of the event that inspired it. But obviously things either seen, thought or felt must be at the heart of any poem, to some extent. Isn’t that a sine qua non? What on earth is a poem about something one has not thought about? Is it something like the sound of one hand clapping?
Of course, Modernist masterpieces such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or Ezra Pound’s The Cantos are concerned as much as anything else with the atmosphere in a particular epoch: things thought and felt and, to varying extents, seen. This isn’t negated by any perceived or actual Modernist attempt at impersonality. But, according to Larkin in his ‘Statement’, the light a poem shines on experience must be pure, not refracted:
As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.
Ouch. Here Larkin was presumably railing against what he saw as the insidious influence of the Modernist ‘mad lads’, as he called them elsewhere, whom he accused of taking poetry from the general to the specialised readership.
But the attack is ham-fisted; his comment is bile and nonsense. First of all: good luck, Philip. A poem cannot exist in a vacuum, cannot be ‘its own sole freshly created universe’ – which is not to say that it is by necessity beholden to the strong gravitational pulls of other bodies.
Secondly, and more significantly, Larkin is simply being disingenuous to his own aims, both as they had been before 1955 (the same year that his second collection, The Less Deceived, had been published) and as they would continue to be. A few years later, in 1962, he was happy to note that the last lines of ‘Absences’, which is included in The Less Deceived and which ends ‘Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!’, sounds like a ‘translation from a French formalist. I wish I could write like this more often’. This is a resonance, of course, not an allusion – much less a dip into the Classical ‘myth-kitty’.
 |
| Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella is published in the Carcanet edition of his Selected Writings, under the FyfieldBooks imprint. Carcanet also publish the Selected Poems of Thomas Hood. |
But whilst he tends to leave the myth-kitty closed, a surprising number of ‘casual allusions’ to other poems or poets are scattered throughout his oeuvre, not least in sardonic or ironic poem titles. For example, ‘I Remember, I Remember’, a poem about forgotten youth written just a matter of months before the ‘Statement’, is named after either Thomas Hood’s or Winthrop Mackworth Praed’s poems of the same name, both of which celebrate memories of youth much more than Larkin’s poem. The title ‘Sad Steps’ is provided by Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, giving an ironic twist to Larkin’s speaker’s own sky-gazing and the reference to ‘the strength and pain / Of being young’. ‘This Be the Verse’, the oft-quoted poem beginning ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, takes its title with comparable irony from Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’. ‘Annus Mirabilis’ is a moniker shared with Dryden’s poem about a year in the seventeenth century. ‘Toads’, another poem written just months before the ‘Statement’, includes the phrase ‘that’s the stuff / That dreams are made on’, an archaic construction (modern English would need ‘made of’) consciously echoing Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, right down to the positioning of the line-break: ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on’.
The list could go on. One can understand and enjoy these poems without picking up on the references, but they are nonetheless there to be noticed by, and to add a wry extra layer of meaning for, certain readers. Each of these poems isn’t ‘its own sole freshly created universe’, but it can be enjoyed on its own terms without requiring the reader to work beyond its most obvious limits – in a way that just isn’t the case with, say, Eliot’s or Pound’s works mentioned above.
In his ‘Statement’ Larkin makes one point I agree with unreservedly: ‘It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.’ This is in the first paragraph, before he provides what is in effect a sort of assessment by means of negation of what constitutes good poetry, with its own silly rules. But this should not blind us to the fact that Larkin broke these rules as often as he stuck to them, paying them almost no heed whatsoever.
Throughout his life he said or wrote quite a lot of silly things about his writing, and in different ways some people are wont to put these things in the way of the appreciation of his poetry, as if to prove him a narrow-minded provincial – ‘essentially a minor poet’, in the words of Peter Ackroyd – with fusty sub-Georgian artistic ideals. Go back to his poems, dear reader: they are proof to the contrary.