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Philip Larkin
Jan. 25th, 2015 09:23 am<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Poetry was not Larkin’s ambition. He wanted to be a novelist. “Novels seem to me richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems,” he remarked in an interview. At first, it seemed he would prosper in fiction. By 24, he had published two fine novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), both finished while singlehandedly running a small-town library. As critic Cyril Connolly once observed, however, “whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.” Larkin spent the next five years agonizing over an abortive third novel. In the meantime he helped Amis revise his debut novel, Lucky Jim. When Amis’s book appeared in 1954 to immense critical and commercial success, Larkin gave up fiction. “It was,” he confessed, “a great grief to me.”
Failure and regret, however, were mother’s milk to the young librarian. As his dreams of being a great novelist expired, Larkin poured his full talent into poetry. He discarded his lofty, early models, Yeats and Auden, and studied instead the homely genius of Thomas Hardy (another novelist-turned-poet). Larkin then brought a novelistic sensibility into his verse. Emphasizing the prosaic virtues of plot, setting, character, and narrative voice—the building blocks of fiction—he crafted a new sort of lyric poem, one firmly placed in the everyday world and yet charged with evocative power. His new poems also had personality; they were simultaneously savage and yet compassionate, very depressing and very funny. His language grew commonplace without losing its musicality, and he displayed a gift for using complicated verse forms in ways that sounded utterly conversational, as in the opening lines of “Annus Mirabilis”:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
-- Dana Gioia, "The Greatness of Philip Larkin" in Commentary Magazine
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Poetry was not Larkin’s ambition. He wanted to be a novelist. “Novels seem to me richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems,” he remarked in an interview. At first, it seemed he would prosper in fiction. By 24, he had published two fine novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), both finished while singlehandedly running a small-town library. As critic Cyril Connolly once observed, however, “whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.” Larkin spent the next five years agonizing over an abortive third novel. In the meantime he helped Amis revise his debut novel, Lucky Jim. When Amis’s book appeared in 1954 to immense critical and commercial success, Larkin gave up fiction. “It was,” he confessed, “a great grief to me.”
Failure and regret, however, were mother’s milk to the young librarian. As his dreams of being a great novelist expired, Larkin poured his full talent into poetry. He discarded his lofty, early models, Yeats and Auden, and studied instead the homely genius of Thomas Hardy (another novelist-turned-poet). Larkin then brought a novelistic sensibility into his verse. Emphasizing the prosaic virtues of plot, setting, character, and narrative voice—the building blocks of fiction—he crafted a new sort of lyric poem, one firmly placed in the everyday world and yet charged with evocative power. His new poems also had personality; they were simultaneously savage and yet compassionate, very depressing and very funny. His language grew commonplace without losing its musicality, and he displayed a gift for using complicated verse forms in ways that sounded utterly conversational, as in the opening lines of “Annus Mirabilis”:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
-- Dana Gioia, "The Greatness of Philip Larkin" in Commentary Magazine
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
