An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man: A Study of Philip Larkin's Poetry [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9783110899290, 9789027927200

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS

LITTERARUM

edenda curat C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University

Series Practica, 60

AN UNCOMMON POET FOR THE COMMON MAN A Study of Philip Larkins

by

LOLETTE KUBY

1974

MOUTON THE H A G U E - P A R I S

Poetry

© Copyright 1974 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. Ν. V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-94479

Printed in Hungary

To Lauren and David

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is impossible to acknowledge all who have, in one way or another, contributed to the production of this book. A true acknowledgement would be a biography. Here I can only express my gratitude to Robert Kusch for the inspiration of his constant approval; to Mollie Walsh Miller for the free gift of her experience and skill ; and especially to Don, my husband, who offered himself as a sounding board, one which returned original echoes - among them the title of this book.

INTRODUCTION

Philip Larkin first came to the attention of the poetry-interested public as a member of the Movement, a group of British poets who proclaimed themselves a 'school' and gave themselves a name in this anonymous letter to the Spectator on Oct. 1, 1954: Genuflections towards Dr. Leavis and Professor Empson, admiration for people whom the Thirties by-passed, Orwell above all (and, for another example, Mr. Robert Graves) are indeed signs by which you may recognise the Movement. It is bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility, especially poetic sensibility about 'the writer and society.' So it's goodbye to all those rather sad little discussions about 'how the writer ought to live,' and it's goodbye to the Little Magazine and 'experimental writing.' The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible in a wicked, commercial, threatened world which doesn't look, anyway, as if it's going to be changed much by a couple of handfuls of young English writers.1 Poetic 'schools' die quickly, however. They remain literary events only through identification with a poet whose work explodes the restrictions of the platform that defines them. On April 23, 1971, The New Statesman carried the obituary of the Movement: Half the poems in New Lines ... are prescriptions for the new poetry, and to that extent are enactments of it, but each is saturated with a strategic, blowstriking, self-awareness, each inhabits an imaginative world dominated by trivial exigencies of literary warfare. Conspicuously absent from the foregoing 'reappraisal' is any comment on the poet whose contribution to New Lines seems to me to have any lasting potency.2

1 "In the Movement", Spectator CXCIII, 399. The letter writer has since been identified as Anthony Hartley. 2 Ian Hamilton, "The Making of the Movement", 571.

10

INTRODUCTION

Philip Larkin's first book of poems, The North Ship, was published in 1945 shortly after he had completed his studies at Oxford and taken a job as librarian at Wellington, a small town in Shropshire. The collection, though it contains some fine poems, was generally ignored by both critic and public, and Larkin himself prefaced the 1966 reissue with a humorous apology : Looking back, I find in the p o e m s n o t o n e abandoned self but several - the ex-schoolboy, for w h o m A u d e n w a s the only alternative to 'old-fashioned' poetry; the undergraduate, w h o s e work a friend affably characterized as 'Dylan T h o m a s , but you've a sentimentality that's all your o w n ' ; and the immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls' school.

The North Ship was followed by two novels which, by comparison with the later poetry, spread their situations and themes somewhat thin.3 The first one, Jill, concerns a "scholarship boy", a 'have-not', thrown into and awed by the world of the Oxford 'haves'. It deals with the moral ambivalence of Kemp, its hero, who on the one hand despises the 'haves' (within his limited frame of reference exemplified by his roommate, Chris Warner, a son of the moneyed bourgeoisie), their callousness, undiscipline, purposelessness, vulgarity, but on the other envies the special penumbra money seems to surround them with, their gaiety, flamboyance, freedom, self-assurance. Kemp is repelled, yet emulates them : he rejects their values, yet aspires to be accepted. As. a psychic defensive maneuver, he invents an alter-ego, which he later unfoundedly transfers to a real girl, Jill. The themes of the story are youth's disillusionment and, with some resemblance to Great Expectations, condemnation of the illusions that are lost. The second novel, A Girl in Winter, described by one reviewer as a "frighteningly accurate picture of loneliness, of emotional isolation", 4 is again a story of disillusionment which traces the genesis of illusion, its growth, and its eventual destruction by actuality. Katherine, the French "Girl in Winter", spends, during her late teens, a summer with an English family. The son of that family becomes the subject of a romantic fancy which, being the product of her own needs, loneliness, and youthful 3

Years afterward, Larkin commented: "As regards my novel-writing activities, I think the impulse I had to write novels . . . was a sort of diffused version of the poetic impulse". See the unpubl. thesis (North Dakota State University of Agriculture and Applied Science, 1965) by Judith Anne Johnson, "The Development of Philip Larkin's Poetry", 12. 1 Harper's CCXXVI (April, 1963), 90.

INTRODUCTION

11

hopes, is embellished rather than destroyed by the years of separation that follow. Katherine herself, as the story later reveals, had become the subject of illusion to a sister in that family. Both loves, unfounded in fact or experience, are psychic inventions destined for reality's disappointment. Themes from both novels reappear, condensed and telescoped, in the poetry that followed. In his shift back to poetry Larkin accurately assessed the strength of his style, which is not hampered by the confines of poetry, but which, in fact, expansion dissipates. All of the motifs, drama, vivid realities contained in the novels are more acutely put in his second book of poems, The Less Deceived, published in 1956, more than ten years after the first.5 This time the poems were not ignored. Louise Bogan in the New Yorker judged : "He has completely escaped from the dry and flippant excesses of some of his contemporaries." 6 And John Press commented in Punch: Reading Hardy may have helped Mr. Larkin to follow more fruitful ways . . . he was wise to shake off the heady fumes of Yeatsian rhetoric. But his literary change of allegiance can scarcely have transformed him from an agreeable romantic novice into a sombre, powerful observer of human sadness and defeat. 7

The Sewanee Review carried John Wain's praise : "I said that there was no one poet who dominated the rest. There is, however, one who is, by common consent, the best of them - Mr. Philip Larkin." 8 And Alun Jones agreed : "It is in the poetry of Philip Larkin that the spirit of the 1950's finds its most complete expression in English Poetry." 9 By the time the third book of poems, The Whitsun Weddings, was published, again almost ten years later in 1965, it was greeted by an atmosphere of critical anticipation : "One of Larkin's masks in The Less Deceived was the sad face of a clown : now, after ten years, the joy is thinner, the gloom thicker, the clown has gone." 10 "Larkin's diction has 5 There was an intervening book, XX Poems, privately published and not available to the general public. "Nearly all XX Poems was reprinted in The Less Deceived. "Ultimatum", "Story", and "A Writer" were very early poems which have never been collected: they were published in The Listener and (last two) The Cerwell (an Oxford Undergraduate magazine) respectively" (Letter to the author from Philip Larkin, April 18,1969). 6 "Books: Poetry for Today", The New Yorker, XXXIV (Sept. 13, 1958), 158. ' "Old Hands and Apprentice Pieces", Punch CCLI (Dec. 7, 1966), 867. 8 "English Poetry : The Immediate Situation", Sewanee Review LXV (1957), 361. 9 "The Poetry of Philip Larkin", Western Humanities Rev. XIV (1962), 145. 10 Joseph Featherstone, "A Poetry of Commonplaces", The New Republic CLII (March 6, 1965), 28.

12

INTRODUCTION

b e c o m e bolder, a n d his ear sympathetically keener. H e m a y b e learning h o w t o love." 1 1 F r o m the outset, beginning w i t h the p o e m s a n t h o l o g i z e d in Lines;12

New

continuing w i t h the novel, Jill, w h o s e h e r o has been categorized

as "one o f the first o f t h o s e displaced, working class h e r o e s " ; 13 until very recently, critical interest has fastened o n Larkin's p o e m s as representative o f the M o v e m e n t , and has praised or derogated t h e m accordingly : Philip Larkin is representative of the younger g r o u p of self-snubbers a n d selfloathers (to w h o m nevertheless, it has never occured to put down their wretched mirrors). 1 4 T h e f u n d a m e n t a l reason for the present low pressure of poetry in England is a simple o n e ; that poetry has become the most self-conscious of the arts, the o n e in which the analytical consciousness has come most close to the creative one. T h e poets w h o survive are those, like Larkin who, sensitive and gifted, can m a k e a n art of their very self-consciousness. 15 O n e of several intellectual, anti-establishment English poets. 1 6 T h e poets in Poets of the 1950''s a n d New Lines d o n o t raise their voices. . . . As a group, they are preoccupied with social a n d cultural shifts in Welfare State England. 1 7 T h e N e w University Wits have their little stories to tell, stories which are pertinent a n d interesting but almost always provincial or parochial; a n d for the most part they tell these stories flatly, in a colloquial m a n n e r that requires none of the effort of m o r e intensified writing a n d that in its very littleness precludes the entrance of the large vision. 18 T h e mixed blessing o f his affiliation w i t h the M o v e m e n t w a s that it brought Larkin, as it did others in the group, Wain, Enright, A m i s , t o such critical attention as w o u l d have been m o r e difficult t o attain singly. T h o s e similarities its members shared indicated a n e w thrust in British poetry s o that t o each accrued the importance o f their total number. 11

Norman Holmes Pearson, The Kenyon Rev. XXVII (Spring, 1965), 384. Ed. by Robert Conquest (London: Macmillan, 1956). 13 Eric Moon, "Between Bombs a Battle for Belief", Sat. Rev. XLVII (Sept. 19, 1954), 49. 14 M. L. Rosenthal, "Tuning in on Albion", The Nation CLXXXVIII (May 16, 1959), 458. 15 Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press, 1963), 263. 16 Rosemary F. Dean, Commonweal LXXXI (Dec. 25, 1964), 459. 17 William Van O'Connor, The New University Wits (Carbondale: Univ. Southern Illinois Press, 1963), 15-16. Some of the other 'New University Wits' are Amis, Wain, Conquest, Davie. It will be noted that two of these writers are also the authors of 'angry young' working-class heroes, "Lucky Jim" and "Lumley". 18 Harry T. Moore, preface to O'Connor, New University Wits, xi. 12

INTRODUCTION

13

On the other hand, as the foregoing quotations amply disclose, the individual poet, not to mention individual poems, had become submerged. Critical commentary seemed to regard the 'Poetry of the Fifties' as though it were the product of a single poet with multiple names, or as a collusion of like-thinking people to promote a literary doctrine. However, the Movement itself had neither the planned genesis nor the cohesive body of literary principles of the Poetic Revolution of 1914. Unlike that movement it had no leading lawgiver, nor were its aims signalized by such definitive terms as 'juxtaposition', 'imagism', 'Objective correlative'. Aside from the fact that he was a student at Oxford around the time the Movement began, and that he is a good friend of Kingsley Amis, one of its leading spokesmen, Larkin's affiliation with the Movement is based on his sharing with others in the group certain very broad stylistic similarities - emotional reserve, plain and colloquial language, wry humor, and the avoidance of heroic subjects. More important, like them he expounds the viewpoint of the middle and lower middle-classes, the 'scholarship boys' who on the one hand resent the stultifying effects of Britain's Welfare State, and on the other resent the still strongly evidenced privileges of wealth and high society.19 Like the 'angry young' novelists and playwrights, Movement poets repudiate the elitist stance and mode of the greatest poets of the 1914 group, as well as their esoteric symbolism and learned allusions. The Movement aims to talk to 'The People', that great chunk of society that lies between the bottom fragment of the minimally literate and the upper intelligentsia. Their language and subject matter avoid the exoticisms of society's extremes - the wealthsheltered (and their fringe of artists and intellectuals) and the ghetto. Their impulse is to reduce the 'credibility gap' between poetry and the public. However, a comparison of Larkin's poems with the letter to the Spectator quoted above shows that Larkin very uneasily fits into even so general a statement of principles as is set forth there. The very flippancy of its tone excludes his poems (if not his critical comments and essays). He is "impatient of poetic sensibility" and has said "goodbye to experimental writing", if by the former is meant aestheticism and by the latter fads like Dadaism, Concretism, or "ideographs". He is also "anti-phoney" (what poet does not claim to be?) and "anti-wet" (the whole Modern movement, after all, carried Hulme's banner of "hard 19

Though he was not a scholarship student at Oxford, Larkin was born and reared in the Midland's Middle Class.

14

INTRODUCTION

and dry"), but he is distinctly interested in suffering, and distinctly unable to be "as comfortable as possible in a wicked, commercial world". If detachment from the problems of the threatened world defines The Movement, then Larkin is not in it. His poetic personae are products of that world, the mid-twentieth century, in which Larkin sees the inherent tragedy of the human condition, in other eras diffused and diluted, gathering to a head, condensed and dramatized in the daily life of the average man. There are no tears in his poems but there is pathos aplenty. The wicked, commercial world, far from being ignored, is repeatedly attacked; its vulgarity, its cold-heartedness, its cheap ideals, its chaotic mobility, its senselessly accelerated changes, its self-centered, confused, lonely people exposed. Even Donald Davie's broader, less sophomoric definition of The Movement does not quite fit : These poets are getting rid of pretentiousness and cultural window-dressing and arrogant self-expression by creating an English poetry which is severely limited in its aims, painfully modest in its pretensions, deliberately provincial in its scope.20

To call Larkin's poetry "deliberately provincial in its scope" in an age where there is small distinction, in the Western World at least, between provinciality and urbanity, just as there is little distinction between formal and informal language, would be very misleading. Moreover, only the surfaces of Larkin's poems are limited and modest. They talk about billboards, train rides, walks in the park, work, but their real subject matter is as pretentious, immodest, and universal as any poetry which deals Time and Death, Idealism and Dualism, Free Will and Fate. This study concerns itself primarily with the content and themes of Larkin's poems, and deals with style - choice of diction, syntactic patterns, point of view - only where it is indispensable for an illumination of the content, and never as a separable aesthetic object. It is all too easy for formal analysis to deteriorate into a naming of the parts; "this is an oxymoron, that an irony, the other an ambiguity". I have attempted, in other words, to translate the poems from the language of poetry to the language of explication and paraphrase, knowing full well, at the same time, that it cannot be done. But hopefully, the reader will have been led to the threshold of an open door. 20

Quoted by Allan Rodway, "A Note on Contemporary English Poetry", Texas Quarterly IV (Autumn, 1961), 68.

INTRODUCTION

15

Chapter I deals with style in the broad sense of the term in an attempt to locate Larkin with reference to English tradition, the Modern movement, and his contemporaries. Chapter VIII deals with specific stylistic devices with reference to particular poems. In Chapters II through VII the poems are discussed under thematic headings instead of the more usual chronological arrangement, since there is a good deal of consistency in Larkin's views over the years. Such changes as do occur, both in his view and his techniques, are mentioned at the point of discussion and again more fully and generally in Chapter IX. This chapter also includes certain poems which have appeared in print but which have not yet been gathered into a book, Larkin's creative motive, his attitude toward art, and his conception of his audience. Because it is not assumed that the reader has Larkin's poetry in front of him, and because it is peculiarly difficult to detach lines from these poems which approximate the meaning of the whole, there is liberal use of quotations, frequently of entire poems. Biographical reference and application has been shunned throughout. Its value is always debatable, and in Larkin's case dangerous, since it obscures the fact that the dialogue in many of the poems is uttered by a variety of personae. In any case, a poet is better interpreted by means of his poems than his poems are by means of his life.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

7

Introduction

9

I. Style and Language Larkin's Position in British Tradition Larkin and Modernism

19 19 28

II. Hardy Themes The Self and Willful Nature Man as Nature Society as Nature Fate III. The Limitation and Implementation of Free Will The Search for Autonomy - "My Will's Fulfilment" "What We . . . Most Want to Do" IV. "Our Element is Time" "This is the Future" Time and Anxiety - "Come and Choose Wrong" The Past "Holds You Like a Heaven" V. The Disillusionment of Reality "Yet . . . You're Bound . . . To Act/As If" Dramatic Monologue and Internal Dialogue VI. "Belief, Must Die" Reality Seen "Again in Different Terms" VII. Everyman's Everyday : The Twentieth Century Generic Individualism

43 44 46 52 54

....

58 58 62 70 70 73 77 81 88 95 103 117 123 134

18

CONTENTS

VIII. Style: Manner and Method Compressed Diction and Metaphoric Form "Meaning and Meaning's Rebuttal" Satire and Sympathy Reality as Symbol IX. From The North Ship to Now "All at once the Quarrel Sank" Larkin's Attitude toward His Art An Audience of Everyman

141 142 146 150 154 159 167 175 178

Bibliography

181

Index

186

I STYLE AND LANGUAGE

LARKIN'S POSITION IN BRITISH TRADITION

Facets of Larkin's style point to several progenitors. In many ways his differences from the modern tradition resemble Ben Jonson's differences from his own contemporaries. Both tend to avoid extended metaphor, strings of similies, and other rhetorical elaborations which in Jonson's time were called 'conceits', or 'bravery' of language. The poems of both have prose sense and a ready surface intelligibility due, in part, in both cases, to the fact that the poems are organized by rational rather than by emotional or imagistic sequences. Both express themselves succinctly, attempting, as Jonson put it, "what man can say / In a little", 1 the poetic impulse being toward reduction and condensation rather than expansion and extension. Neither depends on single, striking lines and memorable phrases to carry the meaning. Jonson's couplets, even the final couplets of epigrams, do not explain the poem. And of Larkin, G. S. Fraser says : "[the] poem moves us as a complex whole. . . . There is nothing, or almost nothing, that we 'apprehend' in the poem before we have 'comprehended' it. There are no single lines and images that flash out at us." 2 Moreover, he is a moralist like Jonson who makes of his theater a kind of complicated moral machine for projecting hum a n behavior onto a screen so constituted as to reveal the true nature of that behavior, a nature always kept hidden by the distorted perspectives of mundane interests and commitments. 3

From Jonson one traces many of Larkin's general qualities through Dryden and Pope, the Augustans, down through the early nineteenth 1

"Epitaph on Elizabeth, L.H.". G. S. Fraser, Vision and Rhetoric (London : Faber and Faber, 1959), 247. 3 John Hollander, introduction to Ben Jonson (= The Laurel Poetry Series, gen. ed. Richard Wilbur) (New York: Dell, 1961), 11. 2

20

STYLE AND LANGUAGE

century poet, Praed, whom Larkin admires4 and whose best poems are "vers de société" written in the Augustan vein and character sketches reminiscent of the Spectator Papers: Some public principles he had But was no flatterer, no fretter He rapped his box when things were bad, And said "I cannot make them better!" 5

What accounts perhaps more for Larkin's admiration of Praed are a number of poems in the form of gossipy verse letters, a species of less profound dramatic monologue ; which satirize the prejudices or mannerisms of the fictional writer. In "The Talented Man", for example, a young woman claims to be enchanted with a "clever, new, poet" whose talent, she avers, compensates for his physical unattractiveness : "He's lame, - but Lord Byron was lame, love, / And dumpy, - but so is Tom Moore." Yet, she concludes, he has a defect for which talent cannot compensate : P.S. - I have found, on reflection, One fault in my friend, - èntre nous Without it, he'd just be perfection; Poor fellow, he has not a sou:e

Larkin, too, writes a type of dramatic monologue, though less obviously sarcastic, far more complex than Praed's, and directed to the middle class as opposed to the leisured, fashionable, late Augustan sophisticates and their provincial imitators whom Praed addressed. Praed's poetry, according to Kenneth Allott, contains exactly that world which Wordsworth says he ignores : The things which I have taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, on foot or in carraige; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election or the borough of H o n i t o n ? . . . What have they to do . . . with a life without love? 7 4

According to John Holloway in "The Literary Scene", The Modem Age (= The Pelican Guide to English Literature VII), ed. by Boris Ford (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), 95. ® "Quince", Selected Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, ed. by Kenneth Allott (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), 83. 6 The Poems ofWintrop Mackworth Praed II, ed. by Rev. Derwent Coleridge (London: Ward, Locke and Co., 1889), 204-206. 7 Selected Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, xiii.

STYLE AND LANGUAGE

21

It may come as a surprise then, one of those unsettling critical contradictions, to find Larkin's name linked also with Wordsworth's. There is, however, some resemblance to both poets. Robert Spector and Christopher Ricks say correctly that "Larkin is committed to portraying life in the language of people, presenting the ordinary in an unusual way." 8 "They have a Wordsworthian subject, the ordinary sorrow of man's life." 9 Certainly Larkin, like Wordsworth, presents the ordinary sorrows of ordinary life, and his tone (perhaps better defined as undertone) is like Wordsworth's, tender and serious. With some exceptions, it is without Praed's briskness and assertiveness, soft while Praed's is loud. And his vocabulary, like Wordsworth's, is highly suggestive, whereas Praed's is highly denotative. On the other hand, Larkin's wry humor and self-mockery, utterly absent in Wordsworth, are found in Praed: Our love was like m o s t other loves; A little glow, a little shiver, A rose-bud, a n d a pair of gloves, S o m e h o p e s of dying broken-hearted; A miniature, a lock of hair, T h e usual v o w s , and then w e parted. 1 0

Most unlike Wordsworth, however, is Larkin's treatment of the ordinary. No matter how average Wordsworth's characters are, or how simple their pursuits, they come "trailing clouds of glory". That combination of the ordinary and the glorious is what makes Wordsworth Wordsworth. He invests triviality with a luminescence derived from a spiritual universe. Larkin's universe is bleak if not black. His vision is more like Frost's than Wordsworth's, and uncannily like Hardy's. Among the Victorians, there is a resemblance of Larkin to Browning, though, indeed, disregrading the Aesthetes, there is a resemblance to the moral seriousness which distinguishes Victorian novels and poetry alike. "Seriousness", Cockshut says of George Eliot, was one of her "key words, and is, in general, a word indicating a thread of continuity between eightteenth century piety . . . firmly based on a religious faith . . . 8 Spector, "A Way to Say What a Man Can See", Saturday Rev. XLVIII (Feb. 13, 1965), 47. 9 Ricks, "A True Poet", N.Y. Rev. of Books III (Jan. 14, 1965), 11. 10 "The Belle of the Ballroom", Selected Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, 93. In tone and mood this poem of Praed's is much like many òf Betjeman's whom Larkin also admires.

22

STYLE AND LANGUAGE

and the unreligious morality of George Eliot". 11 As much could be said of Larkin. In fact he says it himself at the end of "Church Going" : A serious house o n serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. A n d that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious. 1 2

With Browning Larkin shares not only moral seriousness but the method of revealing it through dramatic monologue. The speakers in "Mr Bleaney", "Self's the Man", "Dockery and Son", to mention a few, expose their limitations, their self-centeredness, the flaws in their morality or vision in much the same way Browning's "Bishop" or "duke" or "Fra Lippo Lippi" do by dramatizing their personalities in response to a situation, idea, or event. But it is Hardy that occupies a special place among Larkin's literary forebears. Lumping Larkin together with the 'Poets of the Fifties' again, Enright says they "represent a revival of a tradition associated with Hardy and kept alive only through the vigour and persistence of poets like Robert Graves". 13 Similarities of other poets of the Fifties to Hardy is debatable, but Larkin admits his strong influence. After The North Ship, he says, "I looked to Hardy rather than Yeats as my ideal, and eventually a more rational approach, less hysterical and emphatic, asserted itself."14 Though there remains some 'Yeatsian music' in Larkin's poetry, it occurs as climax or emphasis in contrast to preceding more halting conversational rhythms. A comparison of several lines of Larkin's "Mr Bleaney" with several lines from "Sailing to Byzantium" reveals that the music in both depends, to a great extent, on the frequent repetition of identical vowel sounds (in Larkin's case, nine high front vowels, (i), in a total of forty syllables ; and in Yeats' case, six mid back vowels, (o), in the same number of syllables), and on the close correlation between poetic meter (varied iambic) and prose meter (closely approximat11

A. O. J. Cockshut, The Unbelievers: English Agnostic Thought 1840-1890 (New York: N.Y. Univ. Press, 1966), 46. 12 Unless otherwise specified, all quotations of Larkin's poetry are taken from The Less Deceived, 6th ed. (Hessle: Marvell Press, 1966); The Whitsun Weddings, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1965); The North Ship (London: Faber and Faber, 1966). 13 D. J. Enright, Conspirators and Poets (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), 145. 14 See the unpubl. thesis (North Dakota State Univ., May, 1965) by Judith Anne Johnson, "The Development of Philip Larkin's Poetry", 11.

23

STYLE AND LANGUAGE

ing varied iambic). In the following scansion, primary prose stresses are below the line, and those indicating the patterned meter above: ^ '

^ /

w

/

w /