The Complete poems

What’s evident immediately is that the qualities that have, so far, allowed Bishop to triumph over her American contemporaries (notably Lowell) have their counterparts in Larkin, who has, so far, triumphed over his English contemporaries (notably Hughes). Bishop’s characteristic modesty, meticulousness and, even, anti-Modernism are everywhere to be found in Larkin; what gives the archetypical speaker of a Larkin poem his very particular tone of voice, though, is the peculiarly English sense of his being at once slightly muffled and slightly miffed:

I deal with farmers, things like dips and

feed.

Every third month I book myself in at

The — — — Hotel in — — ton for three days.

The boots carries my lean old leather

case

Up to a single, where I hang my hat.

One beer, and then “the dinner,” at which

I read

The — — shire Times from soup to stewed

pears.

Births, deaths. For sale. Police court.

Motor spares.

Though this poem comes from his last collection, “High Windows” (1974), one may detect in that final line of the stanza the abiding influence of W. B. Yeats as list maker. Larkin has tipped onto Yeats’s pile of “old kettles, old bottles and a broken can” (from “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”) his own “motor spares.” Such integration hadn’t happened with Larkin’s somewhat premature first collection, “The North Ship” (1945), which was so utterly awash in Yeatsiana — swans, wheels, horsemen, dancers, more birds, apples, another horseman — as to be swamped. It was only with the publication in 1955 of “The Less Deceived” that Larkin became Larkin. He now showed himself to be the single best big stanza maker after Yeats, but he also managed to fuse the bravura of Byzantium with the banality of Bisto, the gravy mix that was once a staple of the English Sunday lunch:

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, and

stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers,

cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass

and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I

take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence

These last two lines from the opening stanza of “Church Going,” his first great poem, present us with the apogee of that muttering, moping persona we’d soon come to describe as “Larkinesque.” Yeats’s high-concept, cyclical “gyres” have given way to the humdrum “cycle-clips.” Church and state in postwar England are connected, but connected primarily in the sense that “there’s nothing going on.” It’s no accident that “The Less Deceived,” much of which was written while Larkin worked as a librarian at Queen’s University, Belfast, was published a year before the Suez crisis, generally thought to be the death knell of the British Empire. The atmosphere of the Larkin poem would soon be publicly, and popularly, recognized as being perfectly in harmony with the doubting, dowdy, dutiful, down-in-the-dumps environment of Britain in the 1950s.

The magnificent title poem of Larkin’s third book, “The Whitsun Weddings” (1964), shows Larkin setting himself within the tradition not only of Yeats but of the 12 poets he professed always to keep “within reach of my working chair.” These were Hardy, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Barnes, Praed, Betjeman, Whitman, Frost and Owen:

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise

The weddings made

Each station that we stopped at: sun

destroys

The interest of what’s happening in the

shade,

And down the long cool platforms

whoops and skirls

I took for porters larking with the mails,

And went on reading. Once we started,

though,

We passed them, grinning and pomaded,

girls

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event

Waving goodbye

To something that survived it.

Archie Burnett’s commentary to “The Complete Poems,” which aims to be exhaustive, is sometimes exhausting. In his notes on “The Whitsun Weddings,” for example, he draws attention both to John Osborne’s rather persuasive argument that the poem is in dialogue with Eliot’s “Waste Land” and to the gossip from one of Larkin’s colleagues at the Hull University Library that Larkin had told him that the line “I took for porters larking with the mails” contained “a punning reference to a student, Miss Porter, whom he professed to lust after.” No direct mention is made by Burnett of the pun, in “larking,” on the poet’s own name, or the possibility that the “porters” may just as readily refer to “Mrs. Porter and her daughter” from “The Waste Land.”

Except, perhaps, in the area of “lusting after,” where the Larkin persona who’s unlucky in love bears little resemblance to the historical Larkin (vying as he does with Yeats not only in the stanza department but in his tendency to be involved with two or three women at any time), there’s quite a bit of overlap between art and life. Given his eye for the ladies, Larkin would probably not have been a viable candidate for the presidency of the United States, not even in 1974, the year Nixon resigned and “High Windows” was published. In quite a number of that volume’s best-known poems, including “This Be the Verse,” Larkin risks appearing as a version of the “uncle shouting smut” who shows up on a station platform in “The Whitsun Weddings.” It’s certainly the case that the publication in 1992 of his “Selected Letters” caused a bit of a plummet in Larkin’s stock; this “Complete Poems” will hardly counter his reputation as a racy, and racist, old codger who wasn’t above a swipe at a homosexual, a Jew or even the odd Irishman. When “The Less Deceived” was turned down by the Dolmen Press in 1954, for example, Larkin would write to his main squeeze, Monica Jones, that at least one poem might have been “too sexy, I suppose, for the priest-ridden crooked little lice.” This is diligently recorded by Burnett in his commentary on the collection, as is the remark Larkin made about Vikram Seth in a letter to Robert Conquest: “Another load of crap from this Vikram Seth character, known to you I believe. Quite pleasant stuff, but fails to grip. Comes of being an Oriental, I suspect.”

I’ve mentioned that a mere 90 pages of this book make up the poems Larkin chose to publish in his four collections, including “The North Ship.” The rest are taken up largely with the commentary, and with “other poems published in the poet’s lifetime” — of which two, “Aubade” and “Love,” are just about worth a second look. Hardly worth even a first look are any of the page after page of “poems not published in the poet’s lifetime.” These include such drolleries as the couplet “Walt Whitman / Was certainly no titman.” Isn’t it worth asking why these poems were unpublished in the poet’s lifetime? Might it be that they were, and are, a “load of crap”? Like Bishop, Larkin is not particularly well served by having every napkin- or matchbook-jotting published. Almost none of these matchbook-jottings illuminate the essential core of Larkin’s work in the way that “Inventions of the March Hare,” say, casts significant light on early Eliot. In the end, though, such is the strength and solidity of that essential core that Larkin’s reputation as the archetypical English poet of the second half of the 20th century should persist well into the

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