Art Wednesday

Have you been reading much lately? Stephen McEwen certainly has. In ‘The Book I Read’, he tells you which classic tomes you should be turning your attention to in lieu of watching The X Factor – less Gamu, more Camus, if you will. Up next – the poetry of Philip Larkin.

‘Life is first boredom, then fear.

Whether or not we use it, it goes,

And leaves what something hidden from us chose,

And age, and then the only end of age.’

Philip Larkin once said that it is ‘Very easy to write about being miserable,’ and from a brief glance at Larkin’s work, it would be tempting to think that he never liked a challenge. But it is not just that in order to understand his work, we must replace a generalising label of ‘pessimism’ with one of sadness, as Eric Homberger did when claiming that Larkin was ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket.’ The overwhelming idea that Larkin has the pessimism of depressed cucumber, alongside the posthumous publication of his personal writings, can somewhat overshadow his poetry and the context in which it was written.

Loosely affiliated with a group of writers known as ‘The Movement’ in the fifties and sixties, Larkin’s work is of its time. He writes of a no longer great Britain, in the midst of post-war decline and emerging into a new Americanised vision of a consumerist society. Even though this is an element of his work, and does support its main ideas, one finds that when such aspects of contemporary existence are used, they are done so in a fashion rather typical of Larkin. His rather ordinary, colloquial, occasionally slow and cold style, allows him to have an almost zoom function in his poetry, zooming into moments and places, to then develop this throughout the course of a poem, before zooming out and writing often proverbially about the real nature of what he is discussing – hope, despair, boredom, meaninglessness. This is no more obvious than in his short poem ‘As Bad as a Mile’, a must read. Yes, it is true, he is interested in death and disillusion, but this should not be a reason for us to bombard him with the same negativity he is accused of emanating himself. Larkin writes in ‘Ambulances’ that death is ‘the solving emptiness/That lies under all we do’, not the cheeriest of thoughts, granted, but by acknowledging this, Larkin can then ascend to a new point of hope and renewal. In facing our greatest, most immanent, most unknown fear, we can no longer toy with illusions, recognising true potential, real movement and indeed, hope. In ‘The Trees’ he writes of the dead leaves of a tree – ‘Last year is dead, they seem to say,/Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’ Death and pessimissm, if faced full on, removes fear and loathing, we are presented subsequently with an image of ourselves and reality, whether we like it or not, that can help us approach existence. This rings true in what is probably his most famous poem, ‘An Arundel Tomb.’ In it, he describes a medieval tomb enshrining a husband and wife, and through his poetic skill and genius, takes a symbol of death and time, to state that we all die, but all live with hope, and (this is the most nail bitingly optimistic Larkin gets) that the tomb proves correct ‘Our almost-instinct almost-true’ idea that ‘What will survive of us is love.’