Life & Background
Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922, the son of a city treasurer with fascist sympathies, and went to Oxford, where he became a lifelong friend of Kingsley Amis. Poor eyesight kept him out of the war. He worked as a librarian for the rest of his life, from 1955 as University Librarian at Hull, a post he held for thirty years and did seriously. He published two novels early, then almost nothing but poetry — four thin collections across four decades. He wrote jazz criticism for the Daily Telegraph. He declined the Laureateship in 1984. He never married, maintaining long overlapping relationships he documented in letters. Those letters and Andrew Motion's biography, published after his death in 1985, revealed racism and misogyny that permanently complicated his reputation.
Church Going
A cyclist stops at an empty country church, checks that nothing is happening inside, and steps in. He takes off his cycle-clips in awkward reverence, looks at the roof and the small neat organ, mounts the lectern and reads a few verses aloud with mock solemnity, then donates an Irish sixpence and reflects that the place was not worth stopping for. He wonders what will happen when churches fall completely out of use — whether a few cathedrals will be kept as museums, whether the superstitious will come to touch a stone for luck. Then the tone changes. He decides the place is a serious house on serious earth, where compulsions meet and are recognised as destinies, and that someone will always be surprising a hunger in himself to be more serious, and gravitating to this ground.
The poem's structure is the reversal in its last two stanzas, and the technique that makes it work is the movement from deliberately flat, comic diction — cycle-clips, some brass and stuff, the Irish sixpence — to a final register of unembarrassed seriousness the earlier tone has earned. This is the Movement manner at its best: plain speech, traditional stanza and rhyme, scepticism about grand statement, and a refusal of modernist difficulty. Larkin's other subjects are the same throughout: the way choices narrow, the failure of love to deliver what it promises, work, ageing, and death, treated in Aubade with a directness few poets attempt.
Why Larkin Matters
Larkin is the central English poet of the postwar decades and the defining figure of the Movement, which set itself against both modernist obscurity and Dylan Thomas's rhetoric. His plain style descends from Hardy, whom he preferred to Yeats, and it dominated English poetry for a generation. He is also the standard case for the question of whether biography should affect literary judgement — the letters revealed views most readers find repellent, and the poems remain what they were, which is precisely the difficulty.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The North Ship1945
- Jill1946
- The Less Deceived1955
- The Whitsun Weddings1964
- High Windows1974
- Aubade1977
- All What Jazz1970