Chapter and verse on a poet who matters

Edited by Archie Burnett

Faber, 768pp, £40

Review by

DAVID SEXTON

Back in 1977, Philip Larkin wrote to Charles Monteith of Faber saying “there is nothing I should like more than a Collected Poems under your imprint”. But it never happened in his lifetime because another publisher, George Hartley of The Marvell Press, would not relinquish his rights to Larkin’s early volume The Less Deceived.

Only in 1988, three years after Larkin’s death, was a 390-page Collected Poems published, under a shared Faber/Marvell imprint, edited by Larkin’s friend and executor, Anthony Thwaite. This edition aimed to include all the poems finished by Larkin as an adult, plus a selection of verses from his teens. Containing no fewer than 83 previously unpublished poems, it added greatly to what had been previously known of his work.

Nonetheless, the volume proved unsatisfactory to many readers. Instead of presenting Larkin’s published volumes as Larkin himself had carefully arranged them (“I treat them like a music-hall bill,” he said), Thwaite had disconcertingly re-ordered the poems by date of completion.

In 2003, Thwaite, responding to criticism, published a revised, more concise (218-page) and more appealingly produced Collected Poems, which returned to Larkin’s own arrangement of his published work, while including as appendices only work that Larkin had published in his lifetime but not collected. Although this version thus omitted such revealing poems as “Love Again”, it was in a sense the Collected Poems that Larkin himself might have wanted — and it has proved the most user-friendly for most readers. For real Larkin enthusiasts, this volume was supplemented in 2005 by an extended edition of Larkin’s Early Poems and Juvenilia.

Now, more than a quarter of a century after Larkin’s death, here is a massive (729-page, barely portable) new Complete Poems – edited all over again by Archie Burnett, a textual scholar, co-director with Christopher Ricks of the Editorial Institute at Boston, previously known for his work on AE Housman.Why is this book worthwhile?

Because, as the years go by, it is becoming steadily clearer that Larkin is the post-war British poet who matters most, on every level, from his influence on other poets to his permanent, ready presence in the minds of all his readers — for he is, as Martin Amis said, borrowing a term from Nabokov, not just memorable but mnemogenic. There is no need deliberately to commit Larkin’s poems to memory; they enter into your very being of their own accord. Again and again, his readers find that what they themselves feel about what happens in their own life is best apprehended, understood and expressed through Larkin’s words and cadences, coming to mind unbidden.

It is, I believe, an experience all who love his work will know well. It’s also laughably easy to spot the same thing happening in the published work of many subsequent British poets, who, reaching for greatness themselves, repeatedly end up doing little more than channelling him, our last two Poet Laureates being particularly susceptible to this inadvertent form of loyal tribute. (It’s particularly funny because both abhor Larkin’s politics.)

On the few occasions Larkin explained why he wrote poetry, he did so in the most humdrum, almost DIYish, terms. Speaking on the BBC Overseas Service in 1958, he put it as simply as this: “If I must account for it, I think it would be best described as the only possible reaction to a particular kind of experience, a feeling that you are the only one to have noticed something, something especially beautiful or sad or significant. Then there follows a sense of responsibility, responsibility for preserving this remarkable thing by means of a verbal device that will set off the same experience in other people, so that they too will feel how beautiful, how significant, how sad, and the experience will be preserved.”

To this responsibility, this preservation, he dedicated his life. “It’s a very small achievement to set against all the rest,” he once wrote despondently to his lover Monica Jones. Surely it is not. The relatively few poems he fully accomplished have become part of common experience: part of us. That is greatness. And it’s why a fuller and more accurate text of Larkin’s poetry than heretofore is not just welcome or useful to specialists but central to the main current of English literature, in a way that can be said of very few new books.

Burnett has chosen to present the poet’s four collections as Larkin himself published them, followed first by those poems he published but didn’t collect, then by those he didn’t publish at all, amounting to 329 pages of text, followed by 400 pages of annotation.

It should be said at once that there are no great new lines of Larkin here. Quite a few previously unpublished verses, garnered from his workbooks and letters, are included, but none of them are major poems. There’s a quatrain ironically maintaining living for others is best: “For when you bitch things, as you’re bound to do, /It’s they who don’t get what they want, not you.” Most are mere squibs and private jokes that belong to their contexts and don’t shine lifted out of them. A lot are bunny rabbit endearments for Jones. Some are little more than a hostage to fortune (“Sod the lower classes,/kick them up their arses,/And we’ll raise our glasses/ When they’ve all caved in”, also from a letter to Jones).

Nearly all of the previously unpublished and uncollected work that has seen the light of day since Larkin’s death has only confirmed that his own judgment of which poems were good was sound.

One of the revelations of Burnett’s notes, which gather together all the relevant references to each poem he can find in both published works and Larkin’s unpublished notebooks and letters, is how sceptically he spoke at the time of poems that now seem to us classic.

Of the lovely “Solar”, his first poem after “The Whitsun Weddings”, Larkin wrote on the day he finished it, “it’s the sort of thing anyone could write, and indeed it ought to be much longer & deeper & altogether better, but one can’t be on one’s high horse all the time”.

There are many good noticings of related remarks and buried allusions throughout Burnett’s commentary, and a full presentation of variant readings, as well as a rather wearying statement of all the slips committed by previous editors, particularly Tolley. His own great mistake is that his commentary gives no page references for the texts of the poems under discussion, so that to bring the two together you need to refer to the index, a constant irritation.

But every reader of Philip Larkin, which is to say every reader of the poetry of our time, will want to own this book, nevertheless.