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Philip Larkin's Poetics

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Philip Larkin's Poetics dc_243_11 Akadémiai doktori értekezés Philip Larkin’s Poetics: Theory and Practice Rácz István 2011 dc_243_11 Contents 1. Introduction: Larkin and Poetics 3 1.1. A Typology of First-person Poems 4 1.2. Larkin Studies: Biography versus Poetry 9 2. Larkin’s Principles of Writing Poetry 25 2.1. Experience and the Tradition of the “English Line” 26 2.1.1. Experience in the “Statement” 27 2.1.2. The Two Stages of Composition 31 2.2. Beauty, Truth and Deception: the Art of Choosing 39 2.2.1. Keats and Larkin 40 2.2.2. Something and Nothing as Experience 45 2.2.3. Idyll and Facing Death 50 2.3. Audenesque Larkin: Non-literary Literature 55 2.3.1. Two Poets and Two Generations 55 2.3.2. Transmutation and Transference 57 2.3.3. For and against Auden 63 2.4. Character, Mask and Monologue 67 2.4.1. Masks and Poetry 67 2.4.2. Masks and Monologues in Larkin 72 2.5. Hardyesque Larkin: Pain in Agnostic Narratives 80 2.5.1. The Lack of Initiation 81 2.5.2. The Consciousness of Death 85 2.5.3. Religion and Agnosticism 88 2.6. Language, Death and Transcendence 93 2.6.1. Experience Outside and Inside 93 2.6.2. Names, Words and the Reliability of Language 97 2.6.3. Asking Questions about Human Life 101 dc_243_112 3. Writing about Time 108 3.1. Time as Prison and the Chances of Escape 109 3.1.1. Metaphors of Time 109 3.1.2. Time as the Moment in History 114 3.1.3. The Figure of the Academic Revisited 120 3.1.4. Time, Death and Work 122 3.1.5. Living in Time 127 3.1.6. Genealogy 131 3.2. Aging 135 3.2.1. From Birth to Old Age 135 3.2.2. Witnessing the Passing of Time 139 3.2.3. Questions about Freedom 143 3.2.4. Confession and Remembering 149 3.2.5. Confessions of an Agnostic 153 3.3. Time as Space 160 3.3.1. Photography and the Past 160 3.3.2. There and Here 167 3.3.3. Time, Space and Rituals 170 3.3.4. Dickens and Son 175 3.3.5. Time as Painting and Architecture 181 4. Coda and Conclusion: Larkin from a Hungarian Perspective 189 Abbreviations 197 Works Cited 198 dc_243_113 1. Introduction: Larkin and Poetics Owing to a great number of publications, readers know more and more about Philip Larkin the man and Philip Larkin the poet. Since the publication of the three most widely used sources (the Collected Poems in 1988, the Selected Letters in 1992, and Andrew Motion’s authorized biography in 1993) numerous further books, essays and articles have contributed to Larkin studies. These include publications of Larkin’s texts (such as Further Requirements in 2001, Trouble at Willow Gables in 2002, and Early Poems and Juvenilia in 2005), personal recollections (for instance, Maeve Brennan’s The Philip Larkin I Knew in 2002), another biography (Richard Bradford’s First Boredom, Then Fear in 2005), and critical studies (the latest being M. W. Rowe’s Philip Larkin: Art and Self in 2011). A. T. Tolley’s Larkin at Work (1997) offers an insight into the genesis of a number of major poems and Larkin’s method of composition. Shorter essays add further aspects to the discussion of Larkin. To mention a few examples: Oliver James has approached “This Be The Verse” from a genetician’s point of view, Richard T. Cauldwell has analyzed Larkin’s recorded readings phonetically, and David Punter has applied Melanie Klein’s psychoanalysis to his poems. All these are important in the study of Larkin, but none of the authors has attempted to discuss Larkin’s poetics as a coherent whole. The reason seems only too obvious: Larkin’s life work is the exact opposite of Eliot’s, whose theory and criticism form a framework around his poetry. My aim with this study is to explore how Larkin’s poetry is pulled together as a cohesive whole by the principles of his poetics manifest in his short essays, interviews, reviews, letters, and the poems themselves. My main interest will be the mechanism of poetry as Larkin conceived of it: how experience can and should become a poem. Larkin was not one of the major essay writers in the history of British poetry. He never wrote a text comparable with Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” or Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. This lack of a conceptualized theory, however, does not indicate a lack of principles. In the first part of this study I will offer an outline of Larkin’s poetics, which is controversial, yet still firm enough to give a theoretical background to his poetry. In the second part I will make an attempt to demonstrate how Larkin put his principles into practice in the poems about his major subject matter: the passing of time. Although Larkin refrained from conceptualization, his poetics cannot be discussed without exploring what he thought of, and how he wrote, first-person lyrics. Therefore, by way of introduction, I will first offer a possible typology of first-person poems, since the dc_243_114 definition of various forms is in the centre of any poetics. This will be followed by a brief summary of Larkin studies. 1.1. A Typology of First-Person Poems It is a commonplace to say that lyric poetry can often be read as the poet’s autobiography: read a poet’s texts in chronological order, and you will see his/her psychological history, the story of the creation of his/her identity. We can ask the question: should we read first-person poems as parts of an autobiography (in which the reference is to something outside the text, the real poet), or as fiction (that is something invented, like the action and characters of a novel)? Paul de Man answered that “the distinction between fiction and autobiography is not an either/or polarity but that it is undecidable”. He added: “Autobiography, then, is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts” (70). In other words: autobiography is always fictitious, and fiction is always autobiographical. It is particularly important to see this when we discuss lyric poetry. We can draw two conclusions. 1. Any poem can be read in the context of the poet’s autobiography (his or her life story), but also independently from it, in a different context. To apply it to first-person poems: whenever the poet creates an “I” in a text, s/he also creates a fictitious identity. 2. We should see a two-way process between the author and the text. The poem is not only the representation of the author’s self: it is also a part of the poet’s constant identity creation. First-person poems contribute to constructing the poet’s own identity; in this way the poem becomes a part of his/her personal history. The speaker (who is a textual construct) is never fully identical with the real poet (a flesh-and-blood person). There is, however, a third agent between the speaker and the real poet: the implied poet. I define the implied poet as the representation of the real poet’s subjectivity in the text. Therefore, it is different both from the real poet and the speaker in the poem. This also means that the implied poet is the link between the speaker and the real poet. As opposed to the former, it is a construct. It is determined by the real poet on the one hand, and the text as an artificial structure on the other. The speaker is always a notion constructed in the reader on the basis of the self- references in the poem; that is on the basis of all those words that refer to the speaker, directly or indirectly (cf. Rimmon-Kenan on character in fiction, 36). The notion that we form is partly verbal, since the speaker in the text is no less and no more than the words referring to dc_243_115 him or her. On the other hand, one also forms this notion as something non-verbal: we will base our image on real people we know and other literary figures we have read about (cf. Rimmon-Kenan 33). To mention an example from Robert Burns: when reading “Holy Willie’s Prayer” one cannot help imagining the speaker by adding elements of one’s own imagination to the picture: elements that are not in the poem, but are concerned with sanctimonious behaviour. These come from patterns that are familiar to us either from our personal (non-literary) experience or from other literary texts. Many typologies of first-person poems are possible; in this study I will use the terms confessional poetry, dramatic lyrics, mask lyrics and dramatic monologues. In what follows I will offer a brief outline of how I define these terms. Most readers will probably expect the speaker and the actual poet to be closer to each other than (or even identical with) the narrator and the author of a novel. (The degree of this expectation also depends on the culture of the reader; I will demonstrate this in the Conclusion.) What such readers expect is confessional poetry, which can be given two definitions. One relegates any kind of autobiographical poetry into this category. In other words, in confessional poetry the real poet, the implied poet and the speaker are nearly identical.
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