Fifteen in Fifteen: Philip Larkin

6. Philip Larkin

I spent much of last year living on a 1960s former council estate in York. For a southern girl from rural Sussex, the unremitting urban bleakness of the view from my window was something I never quite got used to. No trees, no greenery, no omnipresent magpies or startled ducks, no visiting fox – not when you look out onto the backyards of the Victorian terrace opposite. Sure, it was convenient for town, but nothing quite compensated for my first sight in the morning being the flock of mangy pigeons converging on the roof of number 26, or the chap from number 27 climbing over his back gate on his way to work.

I’ve always liked Larkin’s poetry - his direct, accessible style and his very subtle use of rhyme and meter do endear him to the novice poetry-reader. But in the shock of finding myself treeless and penned in by houses, his poetry started to become important. Poets have a tendency to celebrate beauty – Coleridge certainly spends a significant amount of time grumbling about a childhood spent “pent” in cities, unable to spend time in the countryside which was his source of inspiration. Larkin is one of the few poets who dares instead to find inspiration in bog-standard urban landscapes. Read Sunny Prestatyn. How anyone can possibly write a poem about a billboard holiday advertisement getting graffiti drawn on it is beyond me, but Larkin proves it possible. Adverts also feature in Essential Beauty, while the sense of urbanism runs more subtly through poems such as Afternoons, Sad Steps, Here. Even in poems such as Going, Going – which mourns the rapid spread of the towns, and which goes straight to my heart every time I remember the fields at the back of us are due to be built on shortly - the countryside is for Larkin a place to be visited, not lived in. For me, it was a comfort to realise that, however devoid of nature my new environs seemed, they were not therefore by necessity devoid of poetry.

It’s not just Larkin’s settings which are challenging. I own two books of his poetry – The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. Of the two, I’ve long preferred The Whitsun Weddings – not least because it contains An Arundel Tomb – but I find now that I’ve started to grow into High Windows. The reason, I think, is as follows. Larkin is a cynic, who through his poetry chooses to express decided opinions which run contrary to the received moral wisdom of our time. The most famous instance is This Be The Verse (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad…”), which is a serious shock to the system in a society where parents are always right – but for further, more subtle critique of parenthood try Reference Back, in Whitsun Weddings. The Hollywood version of love doesn’t escape – read High Windows, Love Songs in Age, The Whitsun Weddings, even An Arundel Tomb. If you’re fed up respecting the elderly, read The Old Fools; or of having to feel homesick, read Home Is So Sad – and any bookworms will be profoundly shocked by A Study of Reading Habits. Despite the occasional exception, Larkin tends to be rather more tempered in The Whitsun Weddings, and thus more easily palatable for those of us who are made uncomfortable by having all our fundamental values called into question. But it is – and becoming more so as I grow up - hugely liberating to, for example, be able to come home from a desperately dull birthday party spent making conversation with people you don’t know (“asking that ass about his fool research”) to read Vers de Société in High Windows. When the pressure is on to be sociable, popular and well-liked, having Larkin to tell you that being anti-social can be ok is immensely valuable.

Good poetry describes the world in a different way, and in so doing gets close to the heart of our own experience. It is a delight and a relief and a comfort to find written down somewhere some lines which describe your own feelings, particularly if you suspect you are somehow held guilty for feeling this way. In describing his world so differently, so cynically, so contentiously, Larkin appeals to that bit of me which stands somewhat aslant to what society calls “normal”. In his landscapes, his subjects and his opinions, Larkin celebrates the uncelebrateable and says the unthinkable. No wonder he recognised, on his return from Ireland in The Importance of Elsewhere:

Living in England has no such excuse:

These are my customs and establishments

It would be much more serious to refuse.

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.