LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/5. PHILIP LARKIN (1922-1985)

● Born in the peak year of the stream of consciousness (1922), Larkin was, unlike Eliot’ pride in innovation, a shy poetic voice. His major Desperado feature is irony. He is reticent to inscribe words on paper, a preeminently sensitive poet who is unwilling to commit himself to literature.

● Where emotion does not put too much pressure on the lines, the poem resorts to prosaic clarity, as a weapon against confusion, which comes naturally to Larkin, direct follower of Yeats, Eliot and Auden. More often than not, Larkin refuses to use language as a code. He wants there to be no barrier between reader and text. Consequently, his words are commonplace, the sentences blankly correct. He seems to be writing blind poems which make us see.

● Larkin’s poetic manner, like many Desperadoes in fiction and poetry, is frailty. Helplessness is his style, and he works hard to refine it. It expresses a constant disappointment. It applies to Larkin’s faithful and clear probing of privacy, which becomes his main concern. Larkin discovers the virtues of ostentatious, yet blank confession. He attempts an X-ray of everyday life, clothed in everyday words.

● The poem is informal. It begins and ends casually. The style is oral. Familiar and gentle, Larking gives in to lyricism. He writes without verbal fireworks, in a low-keyed style, a gentle poetic voice that hates Eliot’s zest for innovation and returns to the clear text unafraid, glad to be there, meeting the reading eye.

● Like all Desperado writers, Larkin is solitary. There is a private narrative coherence of the volume, which Larkin is restless enough to devise, yet too reticent to make clear. The characteristic Desperado volume of verse is the volume that makes sense only if read entirely, because it hides a narrative. The poem builds a story in a volume, so anthologies are hard to make, as the poem should never be taken out of its assigned place. Fiction thus steals into poetry more than lyricism into prose. It was the other way round with the stream of consciousness.

● As he grows older, Larkin teaches his reader to breathe in despair and bitterness. Poignancy grows. Words, used as catharsis before, seem to become useless. Speech refuses poetry. The poem refuses the poet. In the end, we stand close to a poet who has been banished out of his own words and moods, we hold his hand and we share his despair. Paradoxically, just like Eliot, Larkin grows more energetic and more fond of life, of a poetry of reality, as he grows older. What spurs him into writing well is the sense of loss. If, as Eliot said, Yeats was preeminently the poet of middle age, Larkin is preeminently the poet of the last age, an age that he was spared by an untimely death, at fifty-two.

● Having written little and published even less, Larkin is nevertheless a major voice in Desperado poetry. He devises the relaxed carelessness with which fiction steals into lyricism. The Desperado poetic attitude is the disobeying of poetry. Speech needs no artifice. Larkin uses it as he finds it. Words cannot alleviate the painful poems of this poet who is unable to come to terms either with himself or with his poetry.

by VIC (Cristina Ioana Vianu)