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Philip Larkin
Jan. 30th, 2015 08:07 am<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Larkin was an unlikely candidate to emerge as the best British poet of his generation. To his early critics, he often seemed like a skillful minor talent perversely writing against literary fashion. He was not the most overtly ambitious, innovative, prolific, or influential poet of his time (though he possessed those virtues in less obvious ways). His work exhibited few of the qualities that the tastemakers expected from a late-20th-century poet. He distrusted Modernism, abhorred progressive politics, avoided high culture, and disliked almost all foreign art except American jazz and continental pornography. His reputation grew slowly but ineluctably because his best poems stuck in the memory and wouldn’t go away. By the age of 50, he simply had written more powerful and moving poems than had anyone else. Those poems also spoke to a wide audience, and they addressed in a recognizably personal voice the great themes of love, nature, time, freedom, and death.
-- Dana Gioia, "The Greatness of Philip Larkin" in Commentary Magazine
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Larkin was an unlikely candidate to emerge as the best British poet of his generation. To his early critics, he often seemed like a skillful minor talent perversely writing against literary fashion. He was not the most overtly ambitious, innovative, prolific, or influential poet of his time (though he possessed those virtues in less obvious ways). His work exhibited few of the qualities that the tastemakers expected from a late-20th-century poet. He distrusted Modernism, abhorred progressive politics, avoided high culture, and disliked almost all foreign art except American jazz and continental pornography. His reputation grew slowly but ineluctably because his best poems stuck in the memory and wouldn’t go away. By the age of 50, he simply had written more powerful and moving poems than had anyone else. Those poems also spoke to a wide audience, and they addressed in a recognizably personal voice the great themes of love, nature, time, freedom, and death.
-- Dana Gioia, "The Greatness of Philip Larkin" in Commentary Magazine
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