Misanthrope of the day

I've posted this poem before, but I've never heard a reading from it by its author, Philip Larkin. I implore you not to watch the clip: it's nastily animated which rather detracts from the poetry. 

The poem is This Be The Verse, and Larkin's reading alters the text in minor ways. It's a beautiful, bitter summary of the Angry Young Mens' reaction against their parents' generation, allied to the anti-abstract form of the Movement. Not a new feeling of course: the Bloomsbury Set rejected its Victorian forebears equally passionately in texts such as Lytton Strachey's incendiary Eminent Victorians. 

Larkin knew whereof he spoke: his racist, misanthropic politics were echoes of his father's open Nazism: Larkin Sr. had to be ordered to remove his Nazi memorabilia from his Coventry Town Hall office after World War Two had started. Philip's relationship with his mother was also fraught, claustrophobic and troubling, explaining at least some of his manipulative, dependent, cruel and exploitative behaviour towards other women in his life. 

And yet… his poetry is often so beautiful, aurally and conceptually. It's the final stanza that does it for me. 'They fuck you up…' is almost standard adolescent, Kevin and Perry stuff, and 'mum and dad' is a nod to the post-war generation. But the final stanza's 'coastal shelf' is so evocative, bringing to mind the unseen misery of claustrophobic, mutually incomprehensible and destructive family dynamics. 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. 
  They may not mean to, but they do. 
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats, 
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don’t have any kids yourself.

Poetry corner

Spotted in this weekend's Guardian Review:

They fuck you up the government
You may not know it but they see
That you're a mug and so you'll spend
Nine grand on what they got for free.

(Jay Bernard, '11.16').

Amongst those who got free education were David Cameron (inherited multimillionaire) and George Osborne (inherited £3m from a tax-avoiding family trust fund while he was at university) - these are the people who think you've had it too easy for too long.

Bernard's poem is a parody of Larkin's famous 'This Be The Verse', one of my very favourite poems, especially the final stanza. He was a university librarian with a somewhat dyspeptic approach to students. I suspect he'd have loved fees. But he knew about families. His father had to be asked to remove the Nazi decorations from his office in Coventry Town Hall, several months into WW2.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

Shhh…

I'm still reading Andrew Motion's fine biography of Philip Larkin. I'm liking Larkin less and less as a person, though the poetry (which is what matters) is wonderful.

Sometimes, though, I find uncomfortable similarities between Mr. Larkin and myself. This is the poet on his fellow lodger, Evans, in Wellington, Shropshire, where Larkin was the librarian (p. 124):

…he regards the natural state of two strangers in the same room as conversation. I regard it as respectful and preoccupied silence. In consequence, he tries to make conversation, which I consider rude, and I try to shut him up, which no doubt he considers rude. He's one of those people who regard you as a fit target for conversation of you are reading a book. The ••••.

That last word isn't suitable for a family blog, let alone a librarian in the 1940s. That said, I do possess a t-shirt bearing the legend 'I'm Reading. Fuck Off', though I'm too retiring to actually wear it in public.

To rhyme is not a crime

A while back, I mentioned that I really rated Fflur Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints, a radical novel set on Ynys Enlli, a prime site of Welsh religious and historical interest. I'm not the only one - she's just won the Oxfam Hay Prize. There's a little old colonialism bound up in the award though - she's an established novelist rather than a newcomer, but there's just a hint in this article that it's writing in English that matters. Even more patronisingly, the BBC story is headlined 'Singer-songwriter wins book prize'. I'm sure Dr. Dafydd will love that faintly dismissive tone…

Anyway, mention of her specialism (R. S. Thomas) reminded me that a comment on another post asked me to list and justify my favourite poets. So here we are:

R. S. Thomas. I met him a couple of times, and very unpleasant he was too. I don't agree with some of his attitudes, but I think that he's up there with the greatest poets of the twentieth century - hounded by his position as an anglicised Welsh nationalist, an agnostic vicar, a cold man with deep feelings, a radical conservative in many ways, everything is poured into poetry which is simultaneously calm and heartfelt. I have a CD of him reading many of the poems, and it's spine-chilling.

MacSpAunDay - I'm a 1930s specialist, the time when poets and artists were forced to take sides by history - often damaging their work in the process, but sometimes liberating them from the parlour games of older English literature. MacSpAunday was a sneering nickname for the leftwing, often homosexual, Oxford educated poets of the 30s: MacNeice, Spender, Auden and C. Day-Lewis.

Malory - I'm a sucker for medieval literature (and further back), especially the Arthurian romances that twist and embellish Celtic myths to deal with pressing current concerns.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: burst in on an all-male preserve, demonstrated that she could do all the strict-metre formal stuff, and turned the tables on all the poetry that objectified women as passive, sexless commodities. She's funny too.

Which leads me to Sappho - fragments of whose poetry survived because a parchment was wrapped round a mummified crocodile, 3000 years ago. Passionate, heartfelt, sometimes angry and sometimes loving and technically gifted, she really is out on her own.

She was paraphrased by Catullus - who could go from writing funny filth to passionate love in a heartbeat. I also rate Whitman, Donne, Duffy, Muldoon, and Simon Armitage, who always surprises me by conveying depths of emotion in the most ordinary of phrases, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg for their exuberance and surprising seriousness. Larkin I find interesting but can't warm to, if you see what I mean. Then there are lots of others I'm getting into slowly, like the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth). I could go on for much longer but I have marking to do…