Poetry Against the World

Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain

Magdalena Kay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351002561
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Poetry Against the World: Philip Larkin and Charles Tomlinson in Contemporary Britain brings together two major poets, who espouse opposite aesthetic ambitions, yet are both taken as paragons of Englishness, in order to ask how they pitch their poetry against an inhospitable world. This book explores how these two representative poets seek to redress an "age of demolition" through their poetry, and how their audiences react to the types of redress they propose.

1 An Age of Demolition

Antipathies and Oppositions

Poets are not always easy to get along with. Nor are they always celebratory, no matter if they aspire to the “dithyrambic ideal” or not. Philip Larkin’s mocking phrase does not fit the work of any major modern poets, and not that of many minor ones: the problem poem has taken over the pure lyric as poetry’s most frequent manifestation. As for personal character, the twentieth century boasts a variety of disreputable figures. At first, it may have seemed as though the Anglo-American Modernists were the baddest of the bunch, guilty of expressing every conceivable prejudice. Today, however, Larkin must surely win the blue ribbon for most-disliked poet of our age. There are few vices of which we cannot accuse him. On his part, he seems quite willing to engage in mudslinging from beyond the grave, as more and more of his letters, unpublished poems, and unpublished prose are put before us, and the force of his own dissatisfaction demands acknowledgment.

This very force, though, runs the risk of eliciting reactions that refuse to allow Larkin to be seen as a serious critic of contemporary society. We cannot take him seriously because he offends us. Contra Auden, the poet has not become his admirers. We hold him apart from us, and yet I would hazard that the reason Larkin continues to be read with pleasure, despite all the critical hullabaloo, is that his concerns—however problematically they are expressed—are our common concerns. His poems do not touch us because they explore the incomprehensible, but because, with a sudden sharp shock, we recognize ourselves in them. If Larkin is both praised and blamed for his thorough Englishness, it is because of his capacity to speak to and for his society. It may seem contrary to see him as a social critic, given his iconic status, yet these positions are not mutually exclusive. He is, from the mid-fifties on, often seen as a representative of the very culture he critiques, and beloved by many for forthrightly depicting a society that was, by his own admission, in decline.

It is an undisputed fact that Larkin and Charles Tomlinson did not like each other. The latter gained as much fame for his early attacks on Larkin as for his Modernist internationalism and, indeed, his ambitious and substantial corpus of poetry, which began to be published around exactly the same time as Larkin’s: Tomlinson’s The Necklace and Larkin’s The Less Deceived both appeared in 1955, while both poets had earlier volumes that eluded recognition until their reputations grew (as helped by their association with major British publishers—Faber for Larkin, Oxford for Tomlinson). Rightly or wrongly, Tomlinson stood for values and influences that Larkin flouted. Unsurprisingly, their initial antipathy to each other’s work has disinclined readers to hold them in one thought, yet this very antipathy allows us to discern what is at stake in their far-reaching quarrel over the social place of poetry. Taken together, they mount a profound, sustained cultural critique, which is central to understanding contemporary verse.

Now that we have some distance from the matter, a magnificent situational irony comes clear: Tomlinson’s verse is not so dissimilar to the kind of writing ostensibly sought by the poets he decries, while Larkin’s almost demands to be held up to the standards of the sober, realist aesthetic that Tomlinson promotes. However much it would surprise these poets to be thus connected, their common ground must be conceded: they share a concern for accuracy and for concrete perceptual grounding typical of mid-century verse, for the sparing use of metaphor, maintenance of a rational syntax, reluctance to stylize poetic speech, and, most saliently, a commitment to the here and now (as opposed to, for example, Geoffrey Hill, who also undertakes a cultural critique). Such a brief, list-driven comparison must surely seem willful, and the grounds of their mutual antipathy cannot be denied. Larkin and Tomlinson’s particular roles in British culture were defined in a particularly partisan manner. Yet animosity is often fuelled by a sense of rivalry or concealed similitude. It is exacerbated by the demands of a poet’s cultural environment and often reflects its contours as much as it does the individual poet’s identity.

Defining the Movement

Both poets’ roles in literary history are often defined by their attitudes toward the Movement, a loosely associated group of British poets who reacted against the histrionic New Apocalyptics of the 1940s by attempting to restore a rational, plainspoken idiom. Whether it was born in 1952 with the publication of Donald Davie’s Purity of Diction in English Verse or in 1956 with Robert Conquest’s New Lines anthology, the Movement became official before Larkin was fully aware that he had been drafted into it, and before Tomlinson realized that his former Cambridge mentor, Davie, was on the opposite side of the battle line from him. The Movement was, above all else, a style whose hallmarks were supposed to be clarity, honesty, and plain speech, and not a “school”: the poets associated with it did not have a leader in the same way as the Thirties Poets looked to Auden as their leader, and they did not form a cohesive group (the long friendship of Larkin and Kingsley Amis had nothing to do with the Movement). The poets placed in this category looked to different influences, and their similarity was initially noted as a matter of coincidence: in an omnibus review of four volumes published by the Fantasy Press,¹ Anthony Hartley noted a tone common to all, and linked it to a particular national ethos: “[i]t might be roughly described as ‘dissenting’ and non-conformist, cool, scientific and analytical.” It brings to mind a community:

this is the poetic equivalent of liberal, dissenting England. A liberalism distrustful of too much richness or too much fanaticism, austere and sceptical. … Complication of thought, austerity of tone, colloquialism and the avoidance of rhetoric—these provide some common ground and common dangers… [;] what is certain is that, for better or worse, we are now in the presence of the only considerable movement in English poetry since the Thirties.

(Hartley 260–61)

No wonder it gained so much quick recognition; this is a large burden of expectation. Hartley historicizes the Movement’s roots by stating that it takes its bearings from the 1930s and the common influence of Auden, but this claim seems dubious given Auden’s taste for parable, historical panorama, and occasional grandeur, which his would-be inheritors reject. Davie’s much-anthologized manifesto poem “Remembering the Thirties” considers the distance between “our” times and “theirs”:

A neutral tone is nowadays preferred.

And yet it may be better, if we must,

To praise a stance impressive and absurd

Than not to see the hero for the dust.

(Davie, Collected Poems 35)

No doubt the Thirties Poets were elders against whom the new generation learned to measure itself; but Davie’s argument, in this poem, is solicitous rather than emulative, concessive rather than adulatory. Larkin famously drifted away from an early attachment to Auden.

We must separate admiration from emulation. If anything, the knowledge that they were not true sons of Auden could be said to unite poets of the 1950s and 1960s. The rhyme of “must” and “dust” clinches the issue: heroic England is dead and gone; it’s with Keith Douglas in the grave. Davie proclaims his allegiance with another community in his much-maligned Purity of Diction in English Verse, a Classicist community of writers who value Augustan clarity and the virtues of good prose. His call for “chastity” of diction, sparing use of metaphor, “civilized moderation and elegance” (27), and an urbane “tone of the centre” (87) certainly allies itself with Movement ideals, while his dislike of “the way of excess” (199) and Bohemianism dovetails with the group’s desire to work against the New Apocalypse. Davie conceived Purity of Diction as a manifesto, and it functioned as one in the poetry wars of the 1950s and 1960s. Although he added a conciliatory postscript in 1966 in which he disparaged the Movement’s insularity, he continued to stand behind the book and even added, happily, that Charles Tomlinson, “a poet quite outside the Movement,” was “not opposed” to its thesis (198).² This may not seem surprising, given that Tomlinson was Davie’s student a few years before Purity of Diction was published, but it is unusual that an outsider like Tomlinson would adhere to Davie’s poetic while situating himself firmly outside of the group, which tended to observe Davie’s principles. Larkin, meanwhile, disliked Davie, and yet was touted as the Movement’s most famous member. Its reputation for clarity certainly belies the messy and contradictory nature of such affiliations and parallels. The notion of community is central to the Movement project, yet ironically, the particular community created by its main scholarly voices—Hartley, Davie, Robert Conquest, John Wain—is rejected by both Tomlinson and, sporadically, Larkin.

Contexts and Reactions

The most interesting aspect of the Movement’s many critiques is not that they existed—what literary style is not maligned as soon as it is named?—but that they are so varied. This brief glimmer of communal purpose was barely sighted before it was impugned for its unimportance, lack of passion, apoliticism, covert dependence on a political situation it would not deign to recognize, and, even, its very Britishness. M. L. Rosenthal imperiously proclaims that aside from Dylan Thomas, postwar British poets “have been dominated by the amateur spirit; their poetry does not bite hard enough or deep enough to suit our barbarous American tastes. Both [their] feeling and [their] wit are a little ‘special’ and insular, British in a limited way” (Rosenthal 219). Rosenthal’s “we” seems not royal but communal, and his humor cannot dispel the impression that some national taste-making is underway. The post-Thomas formation is uniquely and unfortunately English, over-refined (“special”) and localized in the worst way. Why it should be especially “amateur” remains mysterious; were there not many amateur Confessionals who sprung up in the United States like mushrooms after a cathartic rain?

This is the context in which Tomlinson and Larkin become pushed apart even further by the scholarly community: Larkin is cast as a prototypical welfare-state Englishman (Rosenthal 222, 225; Alvarez, The New Poetry 24–25), while Tomlinson is, surprisingly, placed in his own category as an American-influenced late Modernist, for whom the influences of Pound, Eliot, and the French Symbolists fruitfully combine with a technical virtuosity learned from Marianne Moore. In other words, Tomlinson is held apart from his country and his times as a curious exception to mainstream English literary history, while Larkin is designated a representative of his community, even while cultivating a notoriously antisocial persona. Rosenthal worries that the promising young Tomlinson will be too negatively affected by an ethos created by young British “self-loathers,” like Larkin, to maintain his unusual virtuosity (Rosenthal 222, 225), while Davie enjoins him to separate the good Movement writers—like Larkin—from the bad, not to view the entire lot as unredeemable.³

Hartley’s previous comments show how such a community was being imagined: as “cool, scientific and analytical,” liberal and “dissenting,” his scare quotes suggesting metaphorical or ironic usage. Davie prefers the metaphor of chastity or restraint (Purity of Diction 198–99); the “bohemian” Thomas’s death in 1953 is, for him, the beginning of a new era. A political interpretation of the Movement suggests that the Cold War encouraged an emotional repression that affected verse: Neil Roberts, extrapolating from Robert Hewison’s work on Cold War culture, holds that the war encouraged “a guarded private life. … Hence the concern of the Movement poets with the problems of perception and expression” (Roberts 122). More convincing is his implication that after the cataclysm of World War II, “heightened rhetoric” and “inflated emotion” were deemed suspicious (Roberts 217). Blake Morrison hypothesizes that “intensity of feeling” was not “available” to postwar poets because it had become “a dangerous liability” (Morrison 107) in this era, but intensity need not be culpably politicized. One cannot argue that the intensity of Ted Hughes’ The Hawk in the Rain (1957) or the intensities of American Confessional poets take their bearings from World War II—the violence they depict is (usually) of a different order. Yet any assumption that writers—let alone poets—will conform to the dominant mood of their age and take its recommendations (i.e., for a “guarded private life”) is even more problematic. Many poets are contrarians, perhaps most. The idea that a country’s public ethos will be organically transmuted into verse is problematic, and any effort to assess poetry’s valiant effort to go against the world must account for the importance of polemic and contrariety to its self-situation. Tomlinson and Larkin’s self-positionings are variable and often perverse, not directly aligned with contemporary historical currents.⁴

World War II did not enter British or American poetry as much as we might expect, and whether this signifies culpable disregard or salubrious desire to face a new era is up for debate. The British apocalyptics were not followed by a political generation seeking to make sense of the war’s aftermath, as elsewhere in Europe. Larkin’s first volume, The North Ship of 1945, has strong apocalyptic elements, but they are not political. Its style can be linked to the influence of early Yeats and Vernon Watkins (through whom Larkin discovered Yeats), but not the political Yeats. When Larkin imitated Auden it was also apolitically, strange as this may sound. For his part, Tomlinson despised apocalyptic verse, which he found incompetent and derivative, and also avoided politics in his first poems, whose minute focus on perceptual detail often held them apart from the sociopolitical world (he would later face it head-on).

A more gradual historical shift allows us to account, at least partially, for the unique tone of English verse in the 1950s: Andrew Motion refers to it as a “levelling democratizing process,” an admirably neutral phrase for a phenomenon bemoaned by many. At least since the Great War, the language of poetry had come closer to everyday language. In his classic study The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell’s tragicomical examples of the darkening of common speech—as, for example, previously innocent words acquired double meanings—illustrate how political ruptures accelerate specific linguistic changes. Poetry began to incorporate more and more language as it was and is actually used, to paraphrase Wordsworth, and to incorporate idioms considered outside its proper province by Victorians or even Romantics. Yeats views the “filthy modern tide” in terms of the wreckage caused by its “formless spawning fury,” but “fury” is not the essence of the idiom itself. Auden described mid-century speech as “wry, the sotto-voce, / Ironic and monochrome” in Nones (1951, n.p.). The democratization that allowed Stephen Spender to compare pylons to “nude giant girls that have no secret”—the phrase’s flat-footed rhythm signalling a purposeful d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Used in Text
• Introduction
• 1 An Age of Demolition
• 2 The Trembling Mirror
• 3 All the Kingdoms of Possibilities
• 4 When Readings Grow Erratic
• 5 Celestial Recurrences, Lost Displays
• Conclusion
• Index