Poetry Against the World

Poetry Against the World: Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Con- temporary Britain provides an insightful examination of Philip Lar­ kin and Charles Tomlinson in the context of antagonism toward poetry, art, and the world. —David A. Salomon, The Sage Colleges

Poetry Against the World: Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain brings together two major poets, who espouse opposite aesthetic ambitions, yet are both taken as paragons of English- ness, in order to ask how they pitch their poetry against an inhospitable world. This book explores how these two representative poets seek to redress an “age of demolition” through their poetry, and how their audi- ences react to the types of redress they propose.

Magdalena Kay is an Associate Professor of English at University of Victoria, Canada. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

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18 The Cultural Politics of Chick Lit Popular Fiction, Postfeminism and Representation Heike Missler

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20 Poetry Against the World Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain Magdalena Kay

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com. Poetry Against the World Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain

Magdalena Kay First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Magdalena Kay to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-1-138-54566-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-00258-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra For Leonora and Spencer

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations Used in Text xi

Introduction: “The mind is a hunter of forms” 1

1 An Age of Demolition 21

2 The Trembling Mirror 46

3 All the Kingdoms of Possibilities 75

4 When Readings Grow Erratic 106

5 Celestial Recurrences, Lost Displays 143

Conclusion 175

Index 183

Acknowledgments

I thank the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin for granting me a short-term research fellowship, which I took in the spring of 2014. This fellowship allowed me to consult the Tomlinson archives, which proved crucial for fulfilling the project of this book. I also thank the Hull History Centre in Hull, England for allowing me access to their Larkin materials in the summer of 2013, which include Larkin’s invaluable workbooks. I am grateful to Ivor Maw and Philip Pullen, whom I met on my trip to Hull, for long conversations about Larkin and for trips to various sites associated with the poet. Thanks are also due to The Society of Authors as the Literary Repre- sentative of the Estate of Philip Larkin. I am grateful to my colleagues at the University of Victoria for listen- ing to my ramblings about this book for the past several years. I am grateful to my parents for their constant love and support. To Kim, my gratitude and love. Without you this project would not have been possible. To Leonora and Spencer, who were born while I was writing this book, it is dedicated to you.

Abbreviations Used in Text

The following abbreviations are used for commonly cited work by Philip Larkin. There are, unfortunately, no parallel sources for Charles ­Tomlinson’s work: there are still no complete collections of his poems, prose writing, or correspondence. Hence, Tomlinson’s poems are cited by volume, while Larkin’s are located within his Complete Poems.

CP The Complete Poems FR Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews LM Letters to Monica RW Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–1982 SL Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985

Introduction “The mind is a hunter of forms”

In 1971, a jaded and middle-aged Donald Davie wrote to his best friend, Charles Tomlinson:

Sometimes I wonder why we go on manoeuvering and engineering publicity for ourselves as if we were still young careerists. We’re neither of us going to get any more by way of reputation than what we’ve got already—which is to say, a secure but ultimately trivial esteem. For that after all is what literature has nowadays—since the Pound/Eliot/Lawrence generation the whole business of writing has moved out to the margin of public consciousness and concern.1

There is some truth to this. After the high point of Modernism, after World War II, there was a widespread sense that literature had passed through its moment of greatness. This is not to say that nobody was writing it—there were and are plenty of books being published—but there was no agreed-upon major school of writers, or emergent major figures, that could focus the attention of the reading public. Those greats still living—Pound, Eliot, Auden, Forster—had produced their master- works already. Yeats, Joyce, and Lawrence were very much gone. Samuel Beckett was alive and well, but as far as poetry went, there were few who took direction from him (one who did, Derek Mahon, was of a younger generation still), and Davie and Tomlinson were poets first and foremost. Not only had “the whole business of writing” been eclipsed by cinema and television as far as public visibility, but its “business” aspect was often unattractive to writers who disliked going on lecture tours, giving poetry readings, and being pressed to view poetry as public performance. Yet this myth of decline also has its fantastical aspects. The Mo­ dernists that Davie had in mind also maneuvered themselves into the public eye, whether by befriending the right people or by providing their audi- ence with spectacular performances of their own. Poetry did not lose its ­public aspect during World War II: on the contrary, we currently live in an age of poetry slams, “happenings,” and technological pyro- technics that have the potential to make poetry more visible than ever 2 Introduction to the general public. On the other side of the equation, we may ask whether literature, especially literature in innovative forms, ever enjoyed a broad, general esteem, or even attention. Does Davie truly believe that “public consciousness” used to be greatly occupied with literary Modernism, and that it has now turned politely apathetic, according to literature “secure” yet trivial status? This seems all too familiarly uto- pian. ­Generation after generation idealizes the past as it disparages the present, and in this regard, the complaints of contemporary poets can be seen as part of a timeless and universal pattern. The excitement of the Modernist moment, though, cannot be ­undervalued in assessments of the later twentieth century. Whatever our current reevaluations of Modernism may teach us—such as, most ob- viously, that there was no singular Modernist moment but a wide net- work of temporal and spatial relationships that created what we call Modernism—its mystique remains stubbornly present in the minds of those born later. It may be inaccurate to accord the great achievements of Modernism to one generation, but it is not inaccurate to know that one is not of that generation, that one’s own generation has no Pounds or Eliots or Lawrences at present, and that one’s own artistic efforts are not producing such grand results. This is one source of malaise for post- war British writers, even those who do not readily ally themselves with Modernist aesthetics. For those who do, such as some of the exponents of the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s, it still remains an unfortunate fact that the explosion of avant-garde energy associated with Modern- ism was never replicated on the same scale. It is not so easy to accept the seeming fact that literature must be held separate from life, and particularly poetry, which has been far eclipsed by the novel in terms of public consumption and recognition. Of course, sales are not everything, but a consumerist society will often take them as a marker of importance. Given that importance and visibility are so often connected to relevance, we can see why poets may feel that they must insist upon it in a society that seems to assume their irrelevance. Hence, a young Tomlinson begins a book of essays by declaring that it was written “in the belief that the issues of poetry are relevant to the issues of ‘life’, and that poetry is, in the final analysis, as ‘objective’ a mode of exploration as the study of history, economics or science.”2 There is much irritation behind these scare quotes. Why poetry must be separated from “life” is an unanswerable question. In revising his handwritten draft, however, Tomlinson crossed out the second part of his sentence. Did he find its original claim for objectivity insupportable? Or did he come to doubt the notion of objectivity itself, even while it continued to serve as a foundational concept for his poetics? In his own ruminations on writing, Philip Larkin takes Tomlinson’s assertion of relevance a step further: “looking back I see that I very early on began to use literature as I have used it ever since, namely, to combat Introduction 3 and distort hostile reality.”3 Literature can be a weapon; literature can be a fantasy. Whether one chooses to combat reality or to distort that re- ality in the way one chooses, the basic premise of each act is, to ­Larkin, that the writer encounters a hostile world. He can “use” his literary gift to help him cope with this world, but the type of use he discerns in his own work is less therapeutic than combative. He seems surprised to find that he had taken this posture so early, but not that he encountered a “hostile reality.” Both Larkin and Tomlinson seem to take for granted that there is a fight going on and that their poetry can take a side in it. But what, exasperated readers may ask, is the fight about, and is it actually happening? These poets do not fight in “real” wars. Is their dissatisfaction merely trivial or idiosyncratic? What is it all about? Do we need to care? These questions strike to the heart of Davie’s complaint about the waning of Modernist authority and esteem: we live in an era when can- ons have collapsed and assumptions of unity and authority have been pulled asunder, so that we might legitimately reply that each poet fights her own “hostile reality.” We may also reply that postwar reality is not really so hostile. And here we come to the crux of the issue: World War II had an enormous effect on British politics and society, yet did not produce a literary movement that galvanized poetry and forced it to take on radically new themes and styles. It is a truism that in Britain, this war is often remembered by means of the First, the Great War, which caused such an enormous revolution in culture and taste, and which was commemorated by such an impressive array of poets. The 1940s brought the rise of the New Apocalypse, a group minor enough that only one voice within it—Dylan Thomas—has stood the test of time. Even those who were initially attracted, such as Larkin, quickly turned against it, or realized that what they were actually seeking was a bardic depth and gravitas that could best be found in the work of earlier poets, such as that of William Butler Yeats. Is a lack of new inspiration reason enough for pitting oneself against reality? It seems a rather banal conjecture. But the issue of time was, and is, central: if the Modernists commonly feel a sense of belatedness, the post-Modernists feel it still more acutely. The glorious rebellions from the age of manifestoes had become old news, and the postwar revival of this rebellious spirit was a second-generation response to a first-­generation event. The avant-garde dicta of the contemporary period often bore an uncanny resemblance to the dicta of the 1910s and 1920s. Of course, we should remember that responses to the early contemporary period varied. Tomlinson’s turn to America, in which the experimental impetus of Modernism continued more strongly than in his native England, was a solitary undertaking. There were also many who wished to conserve and modestly revitalize the mainstream itself rather than to veer away from it, and to revive a model of writing that had been overshadowed 4 Introduction by the pomp and circumstance of Modernism. Rebellion and restoration were two distinct endeavors. On the social level, however, this was not always the case. The ­so-called “new prosperity” of the 1950s is often seen as deadening rather than cul- turally enriching. Nobody would see Britain immiserated, yet the explo- sion of new goods, and concomitant consumerist desire to acquire them for oneself, was not and is not always seen as a positive development. The issue hinges as much upon social psychology and cultural ambience as upon economics, at least for writers of this period, who often sensed that the conservative poetics of the 1950s reflected a smug sense of safety and ease in the general culture. Hence, the young Tomlinson longed for other times and places, romancing his internationalist inclinations, and railed against the shoddiness of contemporary England. National prosperity had not, he believed, come together with a commitment to quality. The very rapidity of new construction (of houses; of estates; of motorways) betokened the carelessness of a society that privileges speed over care, quantity over quality. Ideals of efficiency and utility appeared to displace those of continuity and organic belonging; Tomlinson, like many others, started to wonder whether respect for nature and history was becoming obsolete. One can criticize the culture one lives in, or criticize one’s inability to fit into it. If Tomlinson tends to do the first, the young Larkin tends to do the second. He wonders why his curiously “fish out of water self” so often felt at odds with his surroundings and concludes that he simply does not want the things that others do. He is self-critical enough to see this as a real problem: it seems as if everyone in postwar England cov- ets refrigerators, washer-dryers, wall-to-wall carpeting, “modern” fur- niture, and of course cars. Many choose to buy their own detached or semidetached houses, while he is content to spend much of his adult life in a flat. Although most young professionals would view the prospect of a more ambitious, better-compensated job with pleasure, Larkin feels nervous when a good new job threatens to become a reality. This is, he ponders, not exactly the sort of life he dreamt of: the “wage-slavery” of the middle class, eager to get ahead and increase its purchasing power, is at odds with his character. Although he is no bohemian—at least not in the typical sense—he cannot quite feel at home in a society that priori- tizes material desires as much as he thinks contemporary England does. The core reasons for this consumerist explosion are fairly simple: in the 1950s and 1960s, wages increased at the same time as taxes were re- duced. Inflation did not keep up with wage increases, which meant that working people found themselves capable of spending more money than they could have expected in earlier years. Consumer spending became more and more visible, especially by the so-called “working classes.” This was also a time when new technologies began to enter everyday life, so that televisions, refrigerators, and cars went from being extraordinary Introduction 5 items, out of reach to most people, to being standard possessions in most English homes. Eventually, this prosperity declined in the 1970s, as the modernization and deindustrialization of the British economy picked up speed. The effect of these two postwar decades, however, could not be erased. This was also the time that youth culture came into its own, in- cluding the concept of the teenager, which seems so timeless and biolog- ically appropriate to us today that we can hardly imagine being without it. It was only after the war, though, that teenage culture became a wide- spread, recognizable phenomenon, and the media jumped to embrace it. Once teenagers became economically enfranchised by postwar reforms, their visibility and cultural power rose too, until those in their 30s and 40s began to feel rather curmudgeonly. Certain people need little reason to become curmudgeons, and this is true of many who feel themselves pitted against the world. Individual temperament must be accounted for, but so must cultural pressure: in 1963, a 40-year-old Larkin confesses to his mother, of all people, how uncomfortable he had felt at a lively party: “I do think I ought to know how to dance and drive a car! How badly educated I was! Quite unfit- ted for the modern world” (Larkin in Motion 1993, 336). Clearly some people need to be “educated” in how to be modern, which is a talent that comes more naturally to some than to others, like the talent for being young. Larkin marvels at the way he managed to spend a perfectly agreeable childhood without passing many of the major milestones that contemporary culture associates with youth, especially ­sexual ­milestones—early flirtations, stolen kisses, covert erotic encounters, and, eventually, love and marriage in one’s 20s. Somehow it is possible to be young without having these stereotypically formative experiences, as we call them, just as it is possible to live in the contemporary era with- out feeling oneself part of it. This matter can be more complex than standard accounts of po­ stwar history would have it. The fragmentation of the British Empire is usu- ally seen as the central historical event of this era, from which other events, trends, and facets of social psychology extend in some sort of causal relation, however indirect. This may indeed be true politically. It would be hard to find a British subject who did not have opinions about such a major change to the nation-state, and it is self-evident that this upheaval would cause reverberations in many, perhaps all, aspects of British society. Yet, it is not the sole cause of dissatisfaction in the postwar era. Tomlinson, for example, does not spend much time writing about it in his poetry, prose, or letters. Larkin, however, is rather deeply affected by it, especially in his middle age, when his disgruntlement be- comes more and more politicized. He suspects that Britain’s cultural power is decreasing in tandem with its political power, and this feel- ing fuels the dissatisfaction so clearly displayed in his work. Yet, there is another complication: Larkin hardly published any political poems. 6 Introduction The over-anthologized “Homage to a Government,” written in 1969 and ­often read as an ­invective against the Labour government, is one exam- ple, but it is the only one of its kind. We may read politics into otherwise apolitical poems, and many do, but it is Larkin’s correspondence, not his literary work, which most clearly conveys his sociopolitical attitudes. To some extent, the same is true of Tomlinson. He states that politics only enter his poems indirectly, as his interest is in historical figures rather than political causes; yet, this is rather misleading. Tomlinson’s political opinions enter his poetry far more directly than Larkin’s do, though his most pointed critiques are often reserved for letters and es- says. Social and cultural dissatisfaction, however, can take subtle forms that will not always announce themselves in the language of political partisanship. Poems can present processes of thinking and feeling more curiously and subtly than polemical prose, and these poets often posi- tion their poetic speakers against the world in poignant and sophisti- cated detail. A lyric poem can serve as a form of historical record, but its authority is so contingent, its presentation so mediated, and its focus so often divergent from that of the historically minded reader, that to take it as such and only such is a mistake. We can always derogate a writer’s work by claiming that it does not represent reality as we know it, but this claim is spurious. It may not even represent reality as the poet knows it—beauty and truth often go separate ways. To complicate the matter yet further, a poet’s aesthetic ambitions do not always fit with the crit- ical stances she adopts, and we should not assume perfect consistency between the two. After all, politics do not always mesh readily with aesthetics. The former can learn from the latter as well as vice versa, as is more commonly thought, and the way these poets think within their poems clarifies and deepens our understanding of the globalized, indus- trialized, Western culture that they, and we, inhabit. At this point, a fundamental question begs for response: Why Larkin? Why Tomlinson? A volume by the latter contains a back-cover blurb (by Davie, unsurprisingly) asserting that “[Tomlinson] insists, as he has a right to insist, that he is as authentic a voice of modern Britain as Philip Larkin is” (The Return n.p.). Time and again, these two poets are coun- terposed. Their mutual antipathy might furnish an obvious reason for it, but that is not enough (after all, Larkin shot down most of his con- temporaries in his private correspondence). The very idea that modern Britain has its own voice is crucial here. In an age when the empire was crumbling and Modernist internationalism was largely thought to have receded, the concept of a “voice of modern Britain” was not neutral.4 All could agree that modern Britain now had a shape and character quite different from what it had in the early twentieth century, but what sort of voice would best represent it was a contested question. These poets represent two major postures of the time; they represent two different ways of positioning poetry within and against a world so often seen Introduction 7 as hostile to it. The question of whether they do or could represent the British public, though, is contentious to say the least. If Tomlinson and Larkin can both be seen as representative “[voices] of modern Britain” yet antithetical to each other, then the nature of their voices, and the way they address modern British society, is clearly under dispute. The fact that both poets express considerable opposition to the society they are taken to represent adds an additional complication to the matter. The slightly retrograde Englishness of John Betjeman made him an obvious choice of Poet Laureate, but when Larkin was asked to take up the post after Betjeman’s death in 1984, the choice appeared as a willful taking of sides in the so-called “poetry wars” that pitted traditionalism against the new avant-garde. He had long been allied with the main- stream, yet also composed poems containing slang, four-letter words, and unequivocally unpoetic sentiments. He was known as a hermit and a pessimist. As it happened, he refused the laureateship, which ended up in the hands of Ted Hughes (amusingly enough, a friend of Tomlinson’s). But the fact that Larkin was considered laureate material, that his voice could be thought to stand for the voice of modern England, was irksome enough that Davie’s rather blatant response was put at the top of Tom- linson’s 1987 volume The Return. In this context, it is hard not to read some of the praise for Tomlinson as anti-Larkinian riposte. It pushes against the sort of poetry Larkin had come to stand for: accessible, tra- ditionally crafted, “human” poetry with a discernible lyric speaker who expresses clear emotions. Against this type of poetry, Tomlinson stood as an unusual, vaguely experimental poet of “inhuman” material, with a strikingly impersonal voice whose emotions were either submerged, muted, or, simply, not accessible. Although Tomlinson’s work cannot truly be accused of inaccessibility or radicalism, the terms of these de- bates were striking and divisive. Tomlinson’s public antipathy to Larkin clinched the matter: these two poets began to represent opposite sides of a dichotomy that contin- ues to be made today. One is cold, one is warm; one is too impersonal, one is too personal. Tomlinson is accused of inhuman composure, of refusing to express unhappiness, of hiding his wounds (if they even ex- ist), of living in perpetual—yet possibly contrived—equilibrium, and of relying on the impersonal pronoun “one” rather than risking confes- sionalism by broaching the personal “I.” Larkin, conversely, is accused of too much humanness: he bares too many wounds, shares too many complaints, uses too casual an idiom, and expresses his personal biases too flagrantly. He is politically incorrect. His lyric “I” is assumed to be autobiographical; his written sentiments are assumed to be his own. If Tomlinson withholds what is most humanizing about the lyric, and tests the boundaries of lyricism itself, then Larkin lets too much in. His critics seem to wish he withheld more; Tomlinson’s wish he withheld less. Words such as “demotic,” “irreverent,” “emotional,” and even 8 Introduction “sentimental” are used to describe Larkin’s work (and, by extension, often the man himself); “dour,” “formal,” “careful,” and “focused” are often used for Tomlinson’s work. We develop a sense of writerly persona by means of essential yet ­elusive qualities of voice and tone. One may argue that tone is simply a feature of voice, yet it is often easier to identify the tone of a Larkin poem than to define its voice. We emotionally respond to tone; we in- tellectually construct an identity for voice. There is less disagreement on the matter of specific tones present in Larkin’s poems than on the matter of vocal identity. The man-next-door vernacular associated with him is so frequently counterbalanced by an entirely un-casual high style that the question of which is properly “Larkin’s voice” is a fraught one. ­Tomlinson dislikes Larkin’s casual pose, and actually believes that he has not read the French Symbolists whose specters lurk beneath the sur- face of his verse. His own tone is quite different: cautious, attentive, and educated, unafraid to use vocabulary that may confound the gen- eral reader, one cannot call it philistine, an epithet often assigned to Larkin. One can, however, critique it for being priggish and dry—too “objective,” perhaps—and Tomlinson laments that readers overlook his sense of humor. It is on full display in his letters to close friends, which often astound by their hilarity, yet is so muted in his poems that we may be forgiven for not noticing its presence. Larkin’s humor, on the other hand, is often decried for its crassness or, perhaps worse, taken at face value, when it is usually the effect of a complex layering of irony upon irony (the notorious line “Books are a load of crap” comes to mind). The poetic personae associated with Tomlinson and Larkin could not be more different. We must not, however, make overhasty conclusions about the association of aesthetic choices with ethical postures. Both poets are considered major voices of their age, even if the ­compliment is often grudgingly bestowed. Yet, the unusual nature of their oeuvres also complicates the matter: Larkin wrote only three volumes of “mature” verse, and while a few of his uncollected poems are as import- ant and complex as the published ones, many are of merely documentary value. His two published novels are very early work, often considered juvenilia, and show considerable promise but are not as densely sugges- tive as his poems. In contrast, Tomlinson’s oeuvre is large—­perhaps too large: 20 volumes of published poems, some translations, and a good deal of visual work form a corpus in which one can lose oneself. His poetry is what garnered him international recognition, yet he also has a lifelong devotion to painting and collage (his favorite graphic technique is called decalcomania), and as a young man he expended considerable effort on it, often working himself to the point of exhaustion. Tomlin- son’s readers note the importance of physical perception, and a belief in perceptual discipline, to his work (Michael Hennessy usefully calls it “a trust in the outward-looking, carefully disciplined eye rather than Introduction 9 the inward-gazing mind,” Hennessy 346). Even the most ­disciplined ­perception, though, must allow for the unforeseen. ­Tomlinson thinks his work as a painter helped attune him to such possibilities in his poetry: a decade (1969–79) of intense painterly productivity had “the effect … of admitting into [the poetry] a greater regard for chance and for the mys- terious fulness of the given” (Tomlinson, Eden 73). At the same time, Tomlinson’s poems are nothing if not controlled. Perhaps this helps to explain why they exhibit less effortful ­reworking than Larkin’s do: Tomlinson’s drafts are written and edited quickly, ­often in the space of a few days, and the poems’ finished versions are often quite similar to the original jottings from which they came. There are fewer conclusions to be drawn from Tomlinson’s drafts than from Larkin’s. The latter obsessively revises his poems, whose casual tone be- lies the intense labor involved in their composition. Whole stanzas are angrily crossed out; entire lines are rewritten and patiently reworked, word for word. For that matter, individual words are often taken up and played with, synonyms found and then rejected, nuances of tone scrupulously developed. Not every poem is markedly different in its ­final version, but the poet questions his choices with self-castigating zeal. Certain poems, such as “The Whitsun Weddings,” take years to com- plete, with several breaks in their composition. Larkin often writes to his long-term partner Monica Jones that he has just abandoned a particular poem. Although I have consulted both Tomlinson and Larkin’s rough drafts in this book, they do not inspire equal amounts of analysis. There is sometimes too little to say about Tomlinson’s drafts and too much to say about Larkin’s. These are two different types of poets with different oeuvres, not to mention different temperaments: small wonder that they have not re- ceived much comparative critical attention. That is exactly why it is necessary. Tomlinson and Larkin are both famous for their skeptical, unillusioned perspectives. Their dissatisfaction with contemporary ­British life does not result in utopian fantasy, religious conversion, or even sustained escapism. Neither chooses to emigrate. Neither decides to leap into the political arena to effect change, taking part in con- crete protests, or even writing a series of explicitly political poems. Nor have the conditions they lament been suddenly put to rights—they are hallmarks of the later twentieth century that are, frequently, still with us. Both poets refuse to leave their time and place, perhaps obdurately so, and this makes their dramatic disparity all the more compelling. Tomlinson is called “interestingly out of place in the present generation” (Sharrock 26); Larkin has been called “out of phase,” in the Yeatsian sense of being born at the wrong cultural moment (Perloff 1994, n.p.). Yet, they retain a sense of responsibility to it. By bringing these two po- ets together, their individual contours are put into stark relief so that the significance of each is enhanced by the contrast. Their divergent modi 10 Introduction operandi reveal the complexity of their cultural moment and the possi- bilities of aesthetic opposition to it. Given his negative appraisal of his environment, why would Larkin be called “the centrally representative figure” of contemporary British po- etry (Davie 1972, 188), and why would both poets be consistently allied with the “mainstream” in their mature years? One less-than-satisfying answer may be that feeling out of place is itself representative; another, equally unsatisfying, may be that the mainstream can only be seen as such in retrospect, when the literary historian pronounces tentative iden- tifications to be accomplished facts. Neither Larkin nor Tomlinson saw himself as part of a mainstream current when he started writing mature work—both looked backward or sideways for their major influences. Yet Larkin’s backward gaze represents one important type of British poetry: in Davie’s words, it is “British poetry at the point where it has least in common with American, a poetry which consciously repudi- ates the assumptions, and the liberties, which American poets take for granted” (ibid). “Consciously repudiates” is rather overstated, but it is certainly true that Larkin’s major influences are British and Irish, with a few Frenchmen at the margins, and thus his work reads as a native product. His consciously provocative statements against “foreign” po- etry make this even more obvious, though they have the sad effect of blinding casual readers to the actual complexities of influence at play. Conversely, Tomlinson’s effort to ally himself with this foreign poetry, to seek out influences both American and Continental, makes it easy to cast him as Larkin’s opposite, and his openness as more honorable than Larkin’s apparent closed-mindedness. Readers, however, have flocked to Larkin in a way they have not to Tomlinson: hence, the discrepant amounts of scholarship on each poet. Their critical fortunes are not easy to rationalize. Both poets, though, are allied with Englishness, even if the term ­endlessly recedes before us as we approach it. This matter will be consid- ered in greater detail in subsequent chapters, but for the moment, let us note that it is often a term of abuse for the former poet and a term of praise for the latter. Hugh Kenner declares that “Charles Tomlinson is the first poet to have learned a way of being distinctly English by mastering an idiom markedly international” (Kenner in Tomlinson, Vineyard, back cover). This is high praise. Larkin, however, is consistently lambasted for his Englishness, likened to a sewer under a national monument by Tom Paulin, and denounced for his ostensibly representative English stature by many others. Tomlinson himself is one of Larkin’s earliest critics in this line. It is a major mistake to assume that by ­situating his poems within an imperfect English world, Larkin signals assent to it; the same is often assumed of his casual tone (in other words, that it signals his belonging to a casual contemporary generation that tries to avoid high style). A converse mistake is often made by Tomlinson’s critics: because Introduction 11 so many of his poems appear content with the scenes they perceive, it is easy to assume the poet’s acceptance of his culture. Yet both poets wish for a better, deeper world than the one they inhabit, and both look back at former models of Englishness with the sort of long-distance nostalgia that one has for a reality not experienced in one’s own lifetime. It is certainly true that Tomlinson also looks abroad to offset his ­dissatisfactions with contemporary English culture, while Larkin does not, preferring to assume that things are no better elsewhere. His mind frequently travels toward uninhabited spaces within his own world, while Tomlinson’s “elsewheres” are inhabited and often named. Much has been made of Tomlinson’s internationalism. It is indeed important, but we should distinguish two different motives behind it: one is a deeply personal desire to ally himself with the foreign cultures that excited him as a schoolboy, made accessible through books and the foreign-born teachers who helped provide them. The young poet growing up in the industrial Midlands longed to escape provincialism and seek unknown vistas, though the mature Tomlinson insists on the curious beauty of the smoky industrial landscape in which he grew up. A second motive is sup- plied by his love of Modernist art. The Modernism of Picasso, ­Braque, and Klee came from outside Britain; so did the Modernism of poets such as Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zu­ kofsky, and George Oppen. They did not have counterparts across the ­Atlantic for some time. Basil Bunting’s game-changing Briggflatts was only published in 1966, and he was, for a good while, the only Englishman ­allied with the American Objectivists. The Americans themselves were scarcely available in 1940s and 1950s England when Tomlinson was coming of age.5 They needed to be sought out, and seek he did. It is worth remembering that the contemporary period is not of a piece in terms of technology and accessibility: the poems we can so easily access on the Internet today were once carefully traded commodities, and a copy of Oppen’s 1934 Discrete Series could only be acquired by writing to the poet ­himself—which Tomlinson did, thus beginning a lifelong friendship. Meanwhile, modern American and English poetries had diverged starting in the 1940s. There was a style of formal, “mainstream” poetry produced in the U.S. that could be compared to that of the Movement in England, but the two countries followed separate paths. Confessionalism was an American phenomenon at the outset, one that quickly became unignorable in Britain; so were Objectivism and projective verse, two avant-garde movements that excited Tomlinson. Although the Br­ itish Poetry Revival would create—or, rather, revive and restyle—­avant­- garde currents within the British Isles, it was not especially important for Tomlinson, who enjoyed making frequent trips across the Atlantic and keeping up friendships with Oppen, Zukofsky, and Williams, as well as sporadic correspondence with Moore and Robert Creeley. His focus on 12 Introduction a perceptual poetry, one that laid aside the claims of the ­subjective self in order to delineate the contours of the world outside it, was more in line with the American than the British avant-garde. Although he was close friends with Ted Hughes, another English poet whose work stands apart from that of his contemporaries, their poems are dissimilar. Tomlin- son’s style of exteriority is impersonal—even while a perceiving eye must always be present, as full objectivity is a purely theoretical concept— and committed to what lies outside the self, unlike that of Hughes. The ­titles of his and Larkin’s first mature volumes are indicative: Seeing Is ­Believing (1958) makes a different claim than The Less Deceived (1955). The former asserts that unmediated access to meaning through percep- tion may be attainable; the latter claims to portray a disillusioned per- spective. One who is less deceived may not be undeceived, but is aware that others still cling to deceptions he has lost. There is an implicit social backdrop to Larkin’s title; not so for Tomlinson’s. Here lies another major contrast: despite his misanthropy, Larkin managed to craft a poetic voice that is not just recognizable, but also eminently relatable. Barbara Everett believes this to be one of his great- est achievements. The “publicly-private personality” whose words are so quotable has become part of the English social landscape (Everett in Hartley, George 140–41). Indeed, Larkin’s poems reach out to the very public they seem to scorn; they impart the sort of confidences one only shares with friends. Larkin may pitch himself against the world with zeal and zest, but he does not pitch himself against his readers. His grum- bling is carefully expressed so that it seems to be our grumbling, too, as we suddenly recognize our sympathy with views, which we would rather not recognize. Larkin’s notorious opening line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” strikes the reader with a shock, but may also strike a secret chord of affirmation.6 His poems’ quick turns from harshness to sympathy are nothing if not engaging. His visions may be hauntingly pessimistic yet are also tender, and their tenderness encompasses us, too; conversely, the poet often turns his harsh judgments against himself, not us. The very qualities that his critics disparage are not so perverse as to deter sympathy: to take another example, the minor drama of “Vers de Société,” in which a party invitation is reflexively rejected and then grudgingly accepted, in which the fear of solitude outweighs the desire to avoid superficial sociability, is one that has frequently been felt but never so well expressed. The paradox here is that Larkin earns the affection of the general public at the same time as he earns the opprobrium of his critics. The pessimism of his oeuvre furnishes one reason; the unsavory content of his letters (two volumes of which have been published) and the reve- lations of his biographers furnish far more. Tomlinson did not weigh in on the controversy generated by these publications, which is some- what surprising given his concerted effort to oppose Larkin earlier in Introduction 13 his career. Perhaps he had resigned himself to the general consensus that cast Larkin as a popular poet and himself as a poet’s poet. Perhaps he had settled into one mode of writing, influenced by the avant-garde but by no means wildly experimental, and put aside the bellicosity of his ear- lier views on British mundanity and insularity. Tomlinson kept defend- ing his early influences, however, and the division between Modernist and non-Modernist verse continues to underlie the Larkin-Tomlinson opposition still made today. To some extent, it is encouraged by Larkin’s comments about art that draws attention to its form (as Modernist art so often does). He dislikes the idea that form should take precedence over content, even as the forms of his own poems are often intricate and his drafts reveal great concern with formal shaping. To him, art that calls attention to its own experimentalism is not enjoyable. Larkin does not want to do away with the immediate pleasure of reading, or listening to, poetry and music that one can readily understand, and this basic desire undergirds his notorious antipathy to Modernism. There is, of course, misrepresentation and false assumption at work here: plenty of readers and listeners derive pleasure from Modernist poetry and contemporary jazz, the two main targets of his criticism. Neither are they considered so very inaccessible by their enthusiasts. Larkin’s statements, though, are meant to define his own position. An increasing pessimism motivates his desire to see England as a country in decline. By subscribing to the view that Modernism set literature on the wrong course, and that only a dedicated few might salvage what remains useful of the English literary tradition, Larkin stakes out his space in literary history as he vents his dissatisfaction. Its basis is, un- surprisingly, personal as well as literary and political: as he grows older, Larkin encounters increasingly severe writer’s block and recognizes the small size of his mature oeuvre. His beloved Thomas Hardy was far more prolific than he, but was also not as conservative and simple as Larkin would like to see him (see Robinson in Mallett 105).7 Anyone’s self-assessment should be taken with a grain of salt, and this applies to poets’ assessments of the literary history that includes them. Just as ­Larkin imagines that avant-gardism has threatened the pleasure of read- ing clear, accessible verse, so Tomlinson imagines that insularity and lack of ambition threatens to choke avant-gardism before it has properly taken root in twentieth-century England. Both are subjective judgments; both are important for understanding how these two voices shape our view of their times. These two poets defend two different styles of self-alliance, and ­viewing them in tandem thus allows us to assess the style of debates over the direction of British poetry in the contemporary period. Also instructive is the fact that both of these poets write from the center of a quickly dismantling empire and express two different kinds of ­Englishness in their work. This may seem a perverse point to argue in 14 Introduction light of Tomlinson’s internationalism, and it is indeed surprising to see how few scholars note this apparent perversity. The poet himself does not find it worthy of mention. It is of course possible, and probably cor- rect, to argue that Englishness is itself a figment of the national imagina- tion, too easily co-opted by chauvinism or imperial nostalgia to do much good in the contemporary period, yet the notion remains potent. It is certainly a concept with which both poets grapple, and must be interro- gated in a post-imperial age—the perspective from which one does this, though, is crucial. Both Larkin and Tomlinson critique life in contem- porary ­England even while they are steeped in their national cultures. The question of how to answer such dissatisfaction remains open. These poets’ sense of cultural misfit is never assuaged or “cured” by emigration or by conversion. They are convinced that traditional life and mores are often better than current ones, but how does one improve the present in the name of the past, other than by indulging a modicum of nostalgia? Neither poet takes the obvious path of political commitment in order to work toward a better society, and, indeed, they both refuse to belong in a defined political or social collective. Neither can find any reliable means of reconciling himself with less-than-ideal social condi- tions, yet they also refuse to style themselves as rebels: this is too easy a posture for such complex, sometimes maddening personalities. An obvious question appears: do they base their dissatisfaction in the name of certain ideals or values? What social alternatives do they want? If both poets feel a sense of insufficiency in their current worlds, what might satisfy them? Although they may bristle at the suggestion, both Tomlinson and Larkin do have strong, clear ideals, both aesthetic and social, which pervade their work. Both poets are resolutely secular and refuse the guidance of a religion, even while the temptation toward faith is a strong component of their work. Tomlinson refuses to buy into a sin- gular religious vision, but his sense of mystery, and his attraction toward what Philippe Jaccottet called ouvertures—openings into an unknown element—must be reckoned with, as must his reworking of Christian concepts in mid-career. He insists that these neo-Christian poems are written in a purely secular spirit, but there is clearly a strong attrac- tion toward an indefinable, suprahuman element in his work that defies categorization. Perhaps we can best understand it in juxtaposition to a similar phenomenon in Larkin’s work. He, too, insists upon his own secularism. We cannot associate Larkin’s idealism with a particular reli- gious outlook, but it is a strong and extraordinary feature of his poetry, even if he wishes to be seen as a celebrant of the (merely) ordinary. We must also account for his nostalgic attraction to Christian ceremony—it may be dismissed as a culturally vestigial characteristic but adds an al- most perverse feature to his already complex character. When discussed in brief, these matters may seem convoluted, but such convolutions are central to twentieth-century verse. The century Introduction 15 has often been called a secular age; whether our current one will be post-secular, or, perhaps, more secular still, remains to be seen. It is al- most a truism, though, that a demystified world does not provide enough spiritual or moral gravity for many who nonetheless consider themselves to be thoroughly secular. Larkin and Tomlinson claim that this world is plenty, that its phenomena are rich and deep enough to satisfy them. Even a cursory glance at their work suggests otherwise: these phenom- ena often compel the poet to look outward and upward toward images or concepts that exceed (or, perhaps, complement) the physical world. They are, in their own ways, likewise convinced that the world must sometimes be seen in terms that are not fully secular—for instance, that the ancient concept of mystery retains its full validity in the contempo- rary age and that we cannot do without it. We also cannot do without values or images to set against a sociocultural landscape that so often frustrates and disappoints us. As Louis Zukofsky told Tomlinson, “you either think with things as they exist, or you give up” (Tomlinson, Some Americans 71). Both ­Larkin and Tomlinson remain poets rooted in contemporary reality even if they rebel against its unattractive features. Indeed, their very rebel- lions attach them to the world—neither would disagree with Zu­ kofsky’s premise. It is easy to claim that they “escape” the world by travelling to exciting foreign lands (Tomlinson) or looking beyond urban, industri- alized England to its open fields and skies (Larkin), but this is not truly escape from “things as they exist.” They continue to exist in all their maddening insufficiency, to the point that, as Brian John notes, the young Tomlinson “has depicted no native ground without a sense of place betrayed or architecture demeaned” (John 101). It takes a dra- matic change of job and home for him to find qualities he can appre- ciate in his England. Richard Swigg notes a similar circumstance: the poet’s upbringing affects his view of the British city for years to come, coloring it as “a place of demolitions, dispossessions, and disorienta- tion, in a country unsure of its future” (Swigg 1994, 20). Yet, the young ­Tomlinson is even more firmly tied to his objective aesthetic than the poet in mature age, and steadfastly refuses to spirit himself away from his known, actual world. Despite their obvious poetic differences, we may call both poets ­realists, not fantasists, sometimes contrary to their own longings. Yeats, in particular, is a ghost never exorcised by either, despite Larkin’s pro- testations to the contrary. Even when we cannot pick up clear echoes of Yeats, we can sense his presence pervading their work. This was La­ rkin’s early love, whose influence is audible in his first full volumeThe ( North Ship) and ostensibly gone in the later work. This sudden waning of (obvious) influence enables scholars to clearly demarcate Larkin’s ju- venilia from his mature verse, yet the distinction should not be over- stated. Yeats is a lifelong tutelary presence for both poets, even in their 16 Introduction sober middle age, when Larkin’s thinking continues to be conditioned by Yeats’s ­idealism, and Tomlinson’s by his transcendental scorn of the world. Above all, Yeats’s love of custom and ceremony is of paramount importance. ­Ceremony, which allows material objects and actions to embody transcendent values, roots these poets in the world while cre- ating a highly ritualized and therefore aesthetic relation to it that may allow them to ennoble the contingencies of the present moment. Thus, ­Tomlinson writes approvingly of village customs, of unhurried talks with shopkeepers, and of the slow and ancient craft of stonemasonry. Larkin celebrates harvest festivals, choral Evensong, seasonal recurrence. His fondness for social rituals connects to his sense that “recurrences” hold a meaning that transcends their mundane contexts. Meanwhile, tradi- tional England is slowly dying, becoming replaced by a generic global- ized culture. This topic can elicit Larkin’s sentimentality, which lies close beneath his skeptical disaffection, even while his best celebrations of tradition are not sentimental (in fact, one of his greatest admirers finds “Show Saturday” to be culpably detached, even listless in its view of a traditional country fair). A Yeatsian reverence for ceremony unites the two poets, yet ­predictably, discrepant modes of expression arise from this common ground. ­Tomlinson is caught between his ideal of life lived in organic relation to nature and his desire to see the outside world as wondrously disinterested, totally external to the humans who dwell in it. In his mid- dle age, he is tempted by notions such as incarnation and embodiment, but how is one to keep this from becoming a poetically extractive view, in which we construct our images of essential beauty by taking them from a natural realm that is indifferent to our presence? There are nu- merous complexities to unravel here. Larkin’s love of ritual also exists in uneasy conjunction with his attraction to unpeopled space: whereas rit- ual can strengthen a communal bond with the past and allow for a sense of value greater than the sum of its parts, the individual poet wishes to break free from his social enclosure and to believe in Platonic essences that his skeptical intelligence will just barely allow him to glimpse. Both poets are attracted to the idea of a non-anthropomorphic force— not a personifiable god—that exists beyond the confines of human ratio- nality and mortal life: “Power of some sort or other will go on,” Larkin writes in “Church Going” (Complete Poems 36), a poem far too often read cynically. “[An] earlier, shining dispensation / reached down into mist / and found … solidity,” writes Tomlinson in “A­ nnunciation,” a poem as “unaccountable” yet significant as its central vision Annunci( - ations 1). Both poets eschew explanation of such phenomena, whether it be motivated by utilitarian rationality, dogma (Tomlinson’s poem re- fers to “unchaptered gospel”), or scientific precision (Larkin’s speaker refuses to explain exactly what “power” will outlast him or why he feels compelled to be “serious” upon church grounds). Both find themselves Introduction 17 questioned and critiqued on this score. Tomlinson refuses, however, to fully explicate the visionary moments in his poems; instead, he writes of his aim to “free” images from the stereotypical symbols they have come to represent, even in contexts when their symbolic qualities cry out for recognition. He expands his point thus: “Perhaps poetry is al- ways trying to do that—certainly much twentieth century poetry, in its post-Christian phase, where sacred stories can be reinterpreted and ‘believed’ in a different way.”8 This provocative statement defends his choice to “reinterpret” Christian concepts in mid-career while implying that all poetry may, in fact, be similarly motivated. Of course we can and should disagree. Most secular poets will not call a volume Annun- ciations. Strangely, Tomlinson justifies such decisions by situating them within a twentieth-century “post-Christian” context: the very man who has spoken against his age now allies himself with an entire “phase” of modern writing. We may also decry the assumption that there is, or was, a post-Christian phase, but more germane here is the poet’s defen- siveness. Tomlinson does not want to make an issue of his secularism. Neither does Larkin. Both wish it to be assumed and understood as a foundational condition for their work. Then why would both of them ever wish to look beyond the realia of everyday life? This book will try to provide an answer. First, though, we must acknowledge the very notion of incompatibility. Much as we may be sympathetic to liminal or doubled states of being, certain modes of expression still remain incompatible, even irreconcilable. A “sober,” secular aesthetic cannot coexist with a visionary one. Tomlinson and Larkin do their fair share of dichotomizing and self-defining in this vein. The former insists upon his objective aesthetic and the discipline he forces upon his perceiving eye. In the same vein, Larkin insists that the adjective “religious” cannot be used for any of his work. Referring to the Bible, he states rather bluntly: “It’s absolutely bloody amazing to think that anyone ever believed any of that” (Larkin in Motion 1993, 486). Both poets are loath to admit that their stated aesthetics may be more contradictory than they intend, even while the treasure trove of Larkin’s private letters provides intriguing material for debate. Perhaps even the most sober poet will sometimes find herself in a charged at- mosphere that cannot be called ordinary or explicable when she finds herself at the limit of secularism. Moreover, a poet’s search for an en- tirely secular language that banishes any trace of mystification may be proven impossible and may lead her to confront the very heart of mys- tery itself. Such a process occurs in Tomlinson’s masterpiece “Swim- ming Chenango Lake,” in which a well-disciplined eye slowly discerns a reality less explicable than the poet expected to find. Part of it may be explained by Coleridge’s statement, with which Tomlinson agrees, that “sensation itself is … not the cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself revealed as an earlier power in the process of self-construction” 18 Introduction (Tomlinson in Rasula and Erwin 408). This usefully relaxes a dichotomy that fails to account for some of Tomlinson’s most compelling poems. Yet, how a “process of self-construction” should lead the intelligence into territory that the poet may consciously repudiate, and thus have the potential to remake his very aesthetic foundation, remains contentious. When he quotes ­Maurice Merleau-Ponty on perception, and defines sen- sation as “the melting of person and presence,” Tomlinson gives us a useful vocabulary for discussing an act that simply cannot be explained in the rational and sober terms that he and Larkin prefer when speak- ing of their own poems. There is a difference, here, between how poets speak of poetry (or sensation) in the abstract and how they define the parameters of their own art. How they establish or recognize a space beyond the contingent world while fiercely defending their secularism will be a major topic of this book, not least because of its paradoxical and potentially provocative nature. We are used to aligning writers with particular literary cur- rents, and Tomlinson and Larkin happily do this to themselves. As we have just seen, however, their fields of reference often exceed these self-­ alignments, and it is fair to ask where boundary lines must be drawn between reference and influence. Both poets refer to the Romantics; should we assume their influence? Or is such reference merely inciden- tal? Sporadic and well-submerged references may not add up to much other than isolated footnotes to the poems; continual or obvious ones must be accounted for. Unsurprisingly, Yeats and Eliot are major influ- ences upon contemporary poets thinking through the “death of the old gods” and the place of poetry in and against the world. One may ask how Tomlinson can summon Yeats and Williams at the same time. To some extent, we must split hairs in order to answer: the mature Tomlin- son puts aside the visionary side of Yeats that attracted him as a young man but continues to admire the socially critical side, together with his pose of hauteur. He embraces Williams’ minimalism only in part, but retains a love of his grounded aesthetic and three-ply lineation. Here, matters such as verse structure and emotional posture are as influential and important as more obvious aspects of influence such as thematics and imagery. It would be crude to ask a poem to give proof of a particular belief. It is far more interesting, and does more credit to poetry, to ask how a poem’s treatment of sensual language works as a process of thinking and embodiment. A poem is not an object but an event; it is not static, but dynamic. It does not merely take its place in the world but enacts a movement within itself. It is, however, possible to discern patterns of thinking and feeling that allow us to talk about beliefs, and to question how the poet positions himself against his surroundings. In spite of con- temporary theories of situatedness, Larkin and Tomlinson both wish to believe that a person does, or can, exist apart from what we call the Introduction 19 world. They wish to believe that one cannot be seen as a mere point of intersection for various social forces over which one has little control. If we must see the human subject as inevitably grounded, as part of the world that she critiques, then at least let us grant her the power of imagining herself away. Let us acknowledge that the imagination is a powerful force that can transport one to a Larkinian world of essences, of “beyonds,” of ungraspable states that cannot be accounted for in em- pirical, rational terms. For this reason, it is reductive to label Tomlinson an objective poet and Larkin a subjective one: both believe in the trans- formative capacity of the imagination. Perhaps this constitutes their strongest link to the Romantic tradition that they both disavow. Neither Larkin nor Tomlinson can fully assent to a numinous realm above the world as we know it. Yet, they can, and do, show us how one can write against a world that one did not choose and recognize an alternate sort of world that one may not be able to explain.

Notes 1 Letter from Donald Davie to Charles Tomlinson, Box 17, Folder 26, Charles Tomlinson archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. 2 Poetry and Human Relationships, unpublished book of essays c.1948–50, Box 4, Folder 6, p.13. Charles Tomlinson archive, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. 3 Workbook 5, Nov. 1953–Nov. 1960, Philip Larkin archive, Hull History Centre, Hull, England. 4 Jed Esty’s influential book A Sinking Island paints a useful broad-strokes picture of this era. In particular, the idea that national culture could be recovered as a totality, given the decline of empire, is an intriguing one to apply to postwar poets such as Larkin (163), whose shifting opinions and images of national culture will be discussed in Chapter 5. 5 The 1960s and 1970s, when Williams’s poetry started to appear in England, were an exciting time when the image of American Modernism radically shifted, according to Tomlinson: the “Williamsite camp” that formed was “opposed in so many ways … to the American modernist we had all been taught to respect, namely, T. S. Eliot” (“Words and Water,” O’Gorman 221). Williams was initially published by rather small presses—MacGibbon and Kee, Fulcrum, Calder and Boyars, Cape Goliard, Centaur—but, Tomlinson believes, his appearance opened the gates for other American Modernists to enter Britain, such as Oppen, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Ed Dorn (ibid 222). 6 Gillian Steinberg devotes her study, Philip Larkin and His Audiences, to this interesting phenomenon. She posits that Larkin’s poems exhibit a constant concern for their audience and, furthermore, that Larkin sees his poems as po- tential homes for “the intellectual outsider,” just as jazz can be ­(Steinberg 3). Larkin has a unique talent for creating a sense of alliance within his poems, perhaps especially when it feels slightly transgressive to do so. 7 Richard Palmer makes the apposite point that Larkin himself may have been (or rather, have grown) politically conservative, but his poetic soul was “rad- ical, even Romantic” (Palmer xxi). There are major fractures within Larkin’s self and work that require us to view his pronouncements skeptically. 20 Introduction 8 Charles Tomlinson, handwritten introduction to Annunciations, Box 1, folder 5, Tomlinson archive, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

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When Readings Grow Erratic Alderman, Nigel . “‘The Life with a Hole in It’: Philip Larkin and the Condition of England.” Textual Practice 8.2 (Summer 1994): 279–301. Alvarez, A. Review of The Whitsun Weddings. The Observer 1 March 1964. 27. Bedient, Calvin . Eight Contemporary Poets: Charles Tomlinson, Donald Davie, R.S. Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thomas Kinsella, Stevie Smith, W.S. Graham. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Booth, James , ed. New Larkins for Old: Critical Essays. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000. Booth, James . Philip Larkin: Writer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.141 Bradford, Richard . The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs. London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2015. Bradford, Richard . The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. London: The Robson Press, 2012. Brennan, Maeve . The Philip Larkin I Knew. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. 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Conclusion Glover, Michael . “Charles Tomlinson: Poet and Translator Whose Writing was Influenced and Nurtured by Work from the US and Around the World.” Independent 31 Aug. 2015. N.p. Jenkins, Alan . “Charles Tomlinson at the Crossroads.” Times Literary Supplement 27 Aug. 2015. Larkin, Philip . Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982. London: Faber and Faber, 1983. Perloff, Marjorie . “What to Make of a Diminished Thing.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 19.2 (1994): N.p. Schmidt, Michael . “Charles Tomlinson Obituary: Poet and Translator Who Bridged the Cultural Gap Between Old and New Worlds.” The Guardian 27 Aug. 2015. Stevens, Wallace . Letters. Ed. Holly Stevens . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Tomlinson, Charles . The Sense of the Past: Three Twentieth-Century British Poets. Kenneth Allott Lecture delivered 21 Oct. 1982. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1983.