It comes as no surprise that the Guardian has done something excellent, and while it’s entirely possible that most everyone is already aware of what’s going on over there, it is so fantastic that it’s worth pointing out just in case. That link will take you to the new(ish) Guardian series “Great poets of the 20th century,” where the paper has not only chosen its top seven poets of the previous hundred years, but commissioned insightful introductions by major writers and offered an array of the poets’ work. For free. On the internet.

True, it’s the online extension of a series of small books they’re publishing, presumably to celebrate the brilliance of their decision to do a series on great poets in a newspaper. But it’s nevertheless a wonderful collection, and you should get directly to it if you find yourself in need of some Hughes, Plath, Eliot, Sassoon, Heaney, Auden, or, best of all (for me at least), Larkin.

Around the time everyone realized that Philip Larkin the man was a misogynistic bigot, people stopped liking Philip Larkin the poet. Despite the obvious problems of judging an artist’s work by his or her personal unpleasantness, this hating-on-Larkin policy has, in my own anecdotal experience, taken firm root, even among people who otherwise would be predisposed to Larkin’s particular brand of quasi-formalist lyric poetry.

This sort of dismissal comes in waves, and will likely fade with time. But the best corrective is exposure to the poetry itself, which is frequently perfect and almost always moving. In his introductory essay to the poet, Andrew Motion (unsurprisingly) manages to get at Larkin’s power with one simple example. Larkin’s poetry, he points out, typically “contains a significant level of romance, usually as one part of a dialogue with a much plainer kind of discourse. The title poem of his last book, High Windows (1974), is a good case in point. At the beginning we hear about “a couple of kids” and are made to wonder whether “he’s fucking her and she’s / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,”; by the end we’re contemplating something which is not only a world away from this kind of speech, but actually “Rather than words” altogether. It is a thought: “the thought of high windows: / The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

One can explore all of this further through the poems generously provided by the Guardian, and one should, should one have the time. The Collected Poems would be better, though, for “The Whitsun Weddings” is even more powerful without a flash ad cutting it in half.

(Image borrowed from the University of Manchester, who themselves seem to have borrowed it from the Larkin archives at Hull.)

Tags: books, literature, philip larkin, poetry

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Posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 2:13 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.