Philip Larkin and English Poetry by Terry Whalen

Abstract

exploration of selected writers whose work, including the theme of exile, has enriched the development and growth of modern Canadian fiction. b a r r y t h o r n e / Queen’s University Terry Whalen, Philip Larkin and English Poetry (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986). x, 164. $18.95 Philip Larkin and English Poetry is a pretentious title but no more so than the ur-linguistic headings which often glottal-stop the postmodernist reader. Indeed, there’s something almost comforting, even nostalgic, about Professor Whalen’s introductory remark that his book “is primarily a practical criticism [sic] exploration of Larkin’s poetry, and a reassessment of Larkin’s aesthetic and his place in the traditions of English poetry” (2). That statement shares a certain orotund grandeur of purpose usually associated with late Victorian criticism. In Chapter 2, “ Poetic Personality,” we are informed: There are many ‘different people’ in Larkin’s volumes to date. Hardyesque fatalists, Swiftian cynics, Audenesque blasphemers, Yeatsian bards and Betjemanesque local historians — to cite familiar voices — compete for attention in his works. (10) We are treated then to a discussion of various Larkin personae — “humorous and sarcastic,” “ sad,” “governed by an impulse to praise,” having “a regard for beauty and a hunger for mystical experience.” Of course Larkin has many personae: what major poet hasn’t? Whalen is so busy shadowboxing with Larkin detractors that he doesn’t realize his subject is standing quite successfully on his own feet. We do not need to be told repeatedly that — besides being “cynical” or “ironic” — Larkin is “profound,” “serious,” and “deep.” More important, Whalen introduces a dichotomy which he will discuss under different headings throughout his study — that of “ the ironic and the more sensitive.” In this instance his attention is directed toward “Church Going.” He suggests that the lines in this poem, as in others, “carry their observations of the actual world toward fresh epiphany [are there stale epiphanies?] and an eloquent closing” (20). This matter of “ epiphany” develops through “ the hunger of the imagination” into “solitary wonder” to eventually become, by critique’s end, a rather strange hybrid known as “beholding wonder.” Having summarized his material and beaten back mean-minded critics, 483 Whalen proceeds to explain Larkin’s poems in the context of literary in­ fluence. Chapter 3, “Hunger of the Imagination,” makes connections be­ tween Samuel Johnson’s thought and Larkin’s. It seems to me that Whalen is more comfortable comparing ideas and making cultural judgments than when reading individual poems closely, but that may be because I often disagree with his interpretation of tone and rhythm. Even in the historical context, however, the “ nostalgic sense” persists as simplistic polarities be­ tween “commercialism” and “art” are pushed to the fore. Essentially, what Larkin and Johnson have in common is an “unillusioned” view of life. Being unillusioned, as the lives of Larkin’s sceptical speakers clearly demon­ strate, is not a guarantee of happiness; but it is the view of Johnson in ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ and Larkin in a whole cluster of his poems that, while illusions are sometimes comforting, they also have a tendency to compound misery and increase the spiritual squalor of life. (40) For Whalen there is much more to Larkin than “ the strenuousness of the poet’s pessimism” ; there is beauty. Over a shaky interpretive bridge pro­ vided by T. E. Hulme, our critic transports us to the world of D. H. Lawrence. Very similarly to Lawrence, Larkin refuses to ‘nail down’ the experience into a system of myth, but there is a residual hope for meaning in the poem that is disciplined by the admixture of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ and gives definition to the precarious wonder. (59) Although Whalen perceives “an unmistakable religious dimension to Lar­ kin’s legacy from Lawrence,” I find the nature of that legacy vague. Com­ parisons between various quotations from Larkin’s and Lawrence’s poems (an endnote on page 144 lists over two dozen) which are intended to show “ a mutuality in the poets’ thematic and imagistic usages” seem arbitrary, forced; the sunlight in Larkin’s poems is a watery reflection of the Lawrentian sun. According to Whalen...