The Less Deceived

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The early work of an important poet always has a potential interest, since it is likely to contain anticipations of his later, finer poems; in Larkin's case, however, this interest is limited because of the sharp break in his writing after The North Ship. The resulting sense of human insignificance, including his own, leads him to several of the characteristic features of his work. He rejects “poetic” devices in favor of simpler, more mundane vehicles. His diction, for example, is nearly always colloquial, often coarse, vulgar, or profane. His distrust of a specialized diction or syntax for poetry reflects his distrust of institutions generally. Similarly, he shies away from the intense poetic moment—image, symbol, metaphor—in favor of a discursive, argumentative verse. Although he will occasionally resolve a poem through use of an image or a metaphor, particularly in High Windows, he more commonly talks his way through the poem, relying on intellect rather than emotion or intuition. Larkin can be romantic too, yet it is always a desperate romanticism, infected with loss. Perhaps the most moving poems in this collection are the three (“Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album,” “Maiden Name,” and “Latest Face”) which he wrote for Winifred Arnott, a friend from his Belfast days who married someone else. I particularly love the conclusion to “Photograph Album”: His ponderances on the fate of churches when the religion they were built to serve is gone remind of Nietzsche’s madman, who claimed that cathedrals were now only graves and sepulchres for the dead God. Here Larkin’s cynicism about the way in which our culture is headed is evident, yet paradoxically he is a product of that culture.

Lines 52-54: “For, though I've no idea / What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, / It pleases me to stand in silence here;” Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer.

Summary

The list of poems by Philip Larkin come mostly from the four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime: [1] [2] Larkin’s Selected Letters,edited by his longtime friend, poet Anthony Thwaite, reveals much about the writer’s personal and professional life between 1940 and 1985. Washington Post Book Worldreviewer John Simon noted that the letters are “about intimacy, conviviality, and getting things off one’s heaving chest into a heedful ear.” He suggests that “these cheerful, despairing, frolicsome, often foul-mouthed, grouchy, self-assertive and self-depreciating missives should not be missed by anyone who appreciates Larkin’s verse.” Larkin, ever parsimonious, wrote very few poems during the last decade of his life: Collected Poems reveals a mere seventeen. Many of those concern themselves with his standard topics—the ravages of age, the sense of not being in step with the rest of society, the approach of death. In “The Mower,” for example, he ruminates on having run over a hedgehog in the tall grass, killing it. From this experience, he takes away a feeling of responsibility for the death, a sense of the loss of this fellow creature, and the reflection that, given our limited time, we should be kind to one another. This slight poem (eleven lines) sums up much of Larkin’s thought in his later years: Death is a complete cessation of experience, not a transmutation but a blankness, an end, while life itself is a vale of unhappiness, and people therefore owe it to themselves and one another to make the way as pleasant as possible.

Monica Jones photographed by Philip Larkin on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, 1971. Photograph: Philip Larkin archive Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth."--David Bowie. Bowie and Larkin could have had a good go round about existentialism. Though the former favored the cut-up technique, the latter's wordsmithing cuts like a knife wielded with precision. One's results aren't better than another. I'm just saying a sentiment like the first stanza of "Next, Please", which says "Something is always approaching; every day Till then, we say," is a good counterpart to the seduction of time. Maybe not as catchy, but inescapably true. Lines 45-52: “Or will he be my representative, / Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt / Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground / Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt / So long and equably what since is found / Only in separation—marriage, and birth, / And death, and thoughts of these—for whom was built / This special shell?” His irony, in this poem as in so many, is used defensively; he wards off criticism by beating everyone to the punch. Irony is in some respects safer than laying oneself open for inspection. In many of his finest poems, however, he drops his guard and allows himself to think seriously about serious subjects. The foremost example in The Less Deceived is “Church Going.” The title turns out to be marvelously ambiguous, appearing at first blush to be a mere reference to attending church, but then becoming, as the poem progresses, an elliptical, punning reference to churches going out of fashion. Larkin’s first volume of poetry, The North Ship, went virtually unnoticed at the time of its original publication and would be unnoticed still were it made to stand on its own merits. (It has few.) The poems are almost uniformly derivative Yeatsian juvenilia, laden with William Butler Yeats’s imagery but shorn of its power or meaning; this is the verse of a young man who wants to become a poet by sounding like a known poet. No one has been more critical, moreover, of the volume than the poet himself, characterizing it as an anomaly, a mistake that happened when he did not know his own voice and thought, under the tutelage of Vernon Watkins, that he was someone else. That he allowed the republication of the work in 1966, with an introduction that is more than anything else a disclaimer, suggests a desire to distance the “real” poet from the confused adolescent.During those years, in my reading, I sought out outrageous images and shunned clear-eyed assessments; I sauntered, oblivious, through the topiary gardens of the heart and shunned the desert blooms of the soul. Now that I am in my sixties, however, my inner landscape seems simpler and starker, years of drought having greatly reduced the local population of illusions. And—behold!--the poetry of Philip Larkin looks better all the time. The poem comprises nine stanzas of five lines each. The rhyme scheme follows the pattern ABBAB in each. There are ten syllables per line, with the exception of line four of each stanza which has eight or nine syllables. There is a rhythmic energy about the poem despite its sad tone of lost past and elusive memories.