7 - Larkin and Literary Criticism

Summary

Larkin collected his critical essays in the volume called Required Writing, which appeared in 1983. For the reader of his poetry it is a fascinating book, offering a highly personal view of contemporary literature which tells us a good deal about his preferences and prejudices, as well as containing some splendid insights into the writers themselves. From his review of Iona and Peter Opie's Lore and Language of Schoolchildren in 1960 we learn about the moment of revelation when he realized ‘that it was not people I disliked but children’, and are told that for the simple fact that children are in the process of turning into adults ‘they may be forgiven much’. From his review of Homage to Clio (also 1960) we learn that, in Larkin's view, Auden changed around 1940 into a quite different and greatly inferior poet: only in the early Auden does he find the ‘dominant and ubiquitous unease’ that quickened his sensibilities and produced a truly modern poetry that embodied ‘not only the age's properties but its obsessions’. In his review of Summoned by Bells (1960), and in his much longer introduction to an American edition of the Collected Poems in 1971, we see Larkin's enthusiasm for Betjeman, his favourite contemporary poet, one ‘for whom the modern poetic revolution has simply not taken place’; and learn that he does not read Betjeman uncritically, and is aware of the danger involved in the poet self-consciously turning himself into a ‘personality’: yet ‘although it remains a mystery how Mr Betjeman can avoid the trap of self-importance, exhibitionism, silliness, sentimentality and boredom, he continues to do so’. Three of the essays deal with Hardy, and, in reply to ‘the usual stuff ’ about not many of the poems meriting serious attention, he declares his wish to ‘trumpet the assurance that one reader at least would not wish Hardy's Collected Poems a single page shorter, and regards it as many times over the best body of poetic work this century so far has to show’.