One place from which Larkin might have derived some of this, choriambs and other metrical experiments, is W.H. Auden, who he seems to have read very closely when he was young.
Thanks for this. I wouldn’t have got the Horace connection.
I too know the disquieting and sublime Aubade by heart, along with other Larkin poems. He is the most memorisable poet I know (though Fenton’s ‘God: A Poem’ is another mnemonic contender). Keats’ Nightingale is also good for whisking oneself altogether elsewhere, as are chunks of The Four Quartets.
I had a cataract op not long ago, and, high on fentanyl, recited This Be The Verse and the aforementioned Fenton poem to the captive audience, god help them.
Haha nurses and anaesthetists must hear all sorts of strange things. Every time I gave birth there were different poems that were the “theme tunes” for that particular labour, the things I kept saying to myself. But I have an odd memory for poetry, or I did when I was younger. As a result I can sort of “tune in” a bit like a radio and listen — I mean it feels more like that for a lot of things than it feels like consciously reciting. I agree that a lot of Larkin is very easy to memorise, ditto Auden. I used to know all of Tony Harrison’s wonderful “A Kumquat for John Keats” though sadly I don’t think I do anymore.
The opening paragraph of this piece triggered that wonderful experience of expectation, drawing me forward in search of the insight that inevitably arrives when you say, "...but just that if 'your' Larkin begins with the poems he wrote between 1946 and 1950..."
It speaks to your reading of the debate from which this piece launched by presenting a problem that neither camp can resolve without giving ground. The cry, "ad fontes" - a sort of purity test - cannot compose a stable text free from contextualizing gestures, but removes the provenance that enables us to trace our own path through an author relative to other available paths. Where ought a reader to begin? It struck me that this issue of provenance may grow as the port of entry for poets like Larkin shifts in a digital environment.
Thanks Todd. Yes, I agree, the fact that a lot of people read poetry online now (some indeed mainly online?) definitely adds a further layer to questions about how the context in which we encounter a poem, it’s surroundings etc influences our reading of it. I’ve worked a lot on early modern manuscript circulation of verse which actually in some ways produces quite similar effects to online publication — lots of quoting without context, quite often without attribution or with a mistaken attribution, people quoting just the bit they like and adding their own titles and so on. Quite interesting.
The original debate, largely on Twitter/X, centred as you probably know upon some vociferous advocates for the US “great books” programmes on the one hand, and a junior (and admittedly somewhat bumptious and naive, but serious) scholar on the other hand, who said that he thought all university level students should always be taught by experts. This attracted much mockery and derision, rather unfairly I thought. I think most of the people who weighed in just didn’t realise how different tertiary education can be in different places. I have a lot of respect for the “great books” people and I’m sure there’s loads of top notch teaching going on in that context, but for someone from my sort of educational background, the kind of teaching they advocate — essentially seminar-style detailed group discussion of a text, with little or no set secondary literature, led by someone who is an expert teacher and has some knowledge of the secondary literature themselves but is probably not an expert on the topic — is associated with (good) upper secondary level teaching, not tertiary level. That’s pretty much exactly how I was mainly taught at A level, aged 15-17. Several people weighed in to claim that the idea that undergraduates should only be taught by experts was ridiculous because this doesn’t happen anywhere. But that’s just not true: in my four years as an undergraduate I was only taught by experts. Obviously that’s an elite experience but I am hardly alone. Of course these differences all stem from significant differences at secondary level. I studied only four related subjects (Latin, Greek, History and English) from the age of 15, and three is more common. That’s massively more specialised than, say, US high school so it’s not surprising that tertiary education should be a lot more specialised as well.
Anyway, I think any reasonable person knows that there is no one “right way” to teach well, and that gifted teachers come in a huge range of styles. But I was interested that within the debate most people were taking the primary/secondary distinction at face value, which struck me as strange. Even at A level, we read primary texts in a specific edition, which in most cases included at least some kind of notes or commentary.
Marvellous to read something fresh about Larkin! I have never explored the early poems, and am not sure I want to, but your piece is very illuminating.
I must admit I thought that edition that had the poems in chronological order an abomination: it is so obvious that the poems should be presented to posterity in the arrangements the poet established so carefully.
The Whitsun Weddings was the first book of poetry I bought!
I do think that perhaps the idea of immortality through poetry has had a good innings, and perhaps been worked to death (to mix my metaphors). (I have been reading a lot of 17th century English verse recently!)
Yes a lot of people were outraged by the first Thwaite edition, and it’s not surprising he redid it. As a teenager of course I was pretty oblivious, I certainly didn’t read the intro or pay any attention to the neat notes in small type on each page which tell you where (if at all) a poem was originally published. I don’t think he made the right call, exactly, but I do think it’s interesting how different “my” Larkin is from those who read him in different formats. Thanks for commenting Martin.
Just a lovely piece - thank you. Aubade is one of those poems I memorised without meaning to: I just realised one day when it came to mind that I knew it. What a poet he was (and you've convinced me that he always knew it).
I've always been rather ambivalent about Larkin, but this has given me a greater appreciation of his work—I really enjoyed the long poem, where you can see his confidence in and mastery of his poetic skill. I think even if we don't know for sure whether or not a poet was inspired by such-and-such earlier poet, it can be very fruitful to look at the connections and find the through line.
Thanks Ramya. Yes, I think in that particular poem you can see Larkin drawing on Horatian elements that were widely available to him via English poetry. Ben Jonson alludes to Odes 4.9 very frequently, for example.
One place from which Larkin might have derived some of this, choriambs and other metrical experiments, is W.H. Auden, who he seems to have read very closely when he was young.
Thanks for this. I wouldn’t have got the Horace connection.
I too know the disquieting and sublime Aubade by heart, along with other Larkin poems. He is the most memorisable poet I know (though Fenton’s ‘God: A Poem’ is another mnemonic contender). Keats’ Nightingale is also good for whisking oneself altogether elsewhere, as are chunks of The Four Quartets.
I had a cataract op not long ago, and, high on fentanyl, recited This Be The Verse and the aforementioned Fenton poem to the captive audience, god help them.
Haha nurses and anaesthetists must hear all sorts of strange things. Every time I gave birth there were different poems that were the “theme tunes” for that particular labour, the things I kept saying to myself. But I have an odd memory for poetry, or I did when I was younger. As a result I can sort of “tune in” a bit like a radio and listen — I mean it feels more like that for a lot of things than it feels like consciously reciting. I agree that a lot of Larkin is very easy to memorise, ditto Auden. I used to know all of Tony Harrison’s wonderful “A Kumquat for John Keats” though sadly I don’t think I do anymore.
The opening paragraph of this piece triggered that wonderful experience of expectation, drawing me forward in search of the insight that inevitably arrives when you say, "...but just that if 'your' Larkin begins with the poems he wrote between 1946 and 1950..."
It speaks to your reading of the debate from which this piece launched by presenting a problem that neither camp can resolve without giving ground. The cry, "ad fontes" - a sort of purity test - cannot compose a stable text free from contextualizing gestures, but removes the provenance that enables us to trace our own path through an author relative to other available paths. Where ought a reader to begin? It struck me that this issue of provenance may grow as the port of entry for poets like Larkin shifts in a digital environment.
Thanks Todd. Yes, I agree, the fact that a lot of people read poetry online now (some indeed mainly online?) definitely adds a further layer to questions about how the context in which we encounter a poem, it’s surroundings etc influences our reading of it. I’ve worked a lot on early modern manuscript circulation of verse which actually in some ways produces quite similar effects to online publication — lots of quoting without context, quite often without attribution or with a mistaken attribution, people quoting just the bit they like and adding their own titles and so on. Quite interesting.
The original debate, largely on Twitter/X, centred as you probably know upon some vociferous advocates for the US “great books” programmes on the one hand, and a junior (and admittedly somewhat bumptious and naive, but serious) scholar on the other hand, who said that he thought all university level students should always be taught by experts. This attracted much mockery and derision, rather unfairly I thought. I think most of the people who weighed in just didn’t realise how different tertiary education can be in different places. I have a lot of respect for the “great books” people and I’m sure there’s loads of top notch teaching going on in that context, but for someone from my sort of educational background, the kind of teaching they advocate — essentially seminar-style detailed group discussion of a text, with little or no set secondary literature, led by someone who is an expert teacher and has some knowledge of the secondary literature themselves but is probably not an expert on the topic — is associated with (good) upper secondary level teaching, not tertiary level. That’s pretty much exactly how I was mainly taught at A level, aged 15-17. Several people weighed in to claim that the idea that undergraduates should only be taught by experts was ridiculous because this doesn’t happen anywhere. But that’s just not true: in my four years as an undergraduate I was only taught by experts. Obviously that’s an elite experience but I am hardly alone. Of course these differences all stem from significant differences at secondary level. I studied only four related subjects (Latin, Greek, History and English) from the age of 15, and three is more common. That’s massively more specialised than, say, US high school so it’s not surprising that tertiary education should be a lot more specialised as well.
Anyway, I think any reasonable person knows that there is no one “right way” to teach well, and that gifted teachers come in a huge range of styles. But I was interested that within the debate most people were taking the primary/secondary distinction at face value, which struck me as strange. Even at A level, we read primary texts in a specific edition, which in most cases included at least some kind of notes or commentary.
Marvellous to read something fresh about Larkin! I have never explored the early poems, and am not sure I want to, but your piece is very illuminating.
I must admit I thought that edition that had the poems in chronological order an abomination: it is so obvious that the poems should be presented to posterity in the arrangements the poet established so carefully.
The Whitsun Weddings was the first book of poetry I bought!
I do think that perhaps the idea of immortality through poetry has had a good innings, and perhaps been worked to death (to mix my metaphors). (I have been reading a lot of 17th century English verse recently!)
Yes a lot of people were outraged by the first Thwaite edition, and it’s not surprising he redid it. As a teenager of course I was pretty oblivious, I certainly didn’t read the intro or pay any attention to the neat notes in small type on each page which tell you where (if at all) a poem was originally published. I don’t think he made the right call, exactly, but I do think it’s interesting how different “my” Larkin is from those who read him in different formats. Thanks for commenting Martin.
Just a lovely piece - thank you. Aubade is one of those poems I memorised without meaning to: I just realised one day when it came to mind that I knew it. What a poet he was (and you've convinced me that he always knew it).
Thanks Joel. Yes, it’s incredibly memorable isn’t it?
I've always been rather ambivalent about Larkin, but this has given me a greater appreciation of his work—I really enjoyed the long poem, where you can see his confidence in and mastery of his poetic skill. I think even if we don't know for sure whether or not a poet was inspired by such-and-such earlier poet, it can be very fruitful to look at the connections and find the through line.
Thanks Ramya. Yes, I think in that particular poem you can see Larkin drawing on Horatian elements that were widely available to him via English poetry. Ben Jonson alludes to Odes 4.9 very frequently, for example.
with "have trod" one also thinks of the Hopkins of God's Grandeur, surely a rhythmic influence on PL