UPDATE – see Ira Maine’s comments below!
This is for all those who espouse good old family values.
This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN
BY PHILIP LARKIN
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.
COMMENT by Ira Maine
This is not poetry. It is instead negative doggerel of the first water, appealing as it does to a bitter and twisted lowest common denominator and is in the end, unworthy to be referred to as poetry.
Larkin is presently lionized in English ‘literary’ circles as the best of the ‘Modernist’ poets, (whoever they are) whereas the reality is that the man had very little to add to the poetic canon except to highlight his own intellectual incompetence. His poem, ‘An Arundel Tomb” offers images of an ancient tomb upon which images of an aristocratic couple are carved. This surely, I would have thought, offers Larkin an unparalleled opportunity to muse philosophically on the business of life and death and indeed, the human condition. Instead, having brought the reader’s mind round to to the contemplation of these mysteries, having lured us into a situation where we have begun to expect a revelation, a deeply felt observation from the great man,he offers, bafflingly, the following chronically inadequate comment;
‘…that which remains of us is love…’
What absolute bollox! What on earth does he mean? “Oh, they must have been soooo in love…’?
This is not what we expect from a good poet. This is,sadly the type of reaction we might predictably expect from a reader of a Mills and Boon novel.. This is sentimentalised rubbish which demonstrates absolutely the ‘depth’ of Larkin’s mind. Academics laud the fellow now and write reams of tosh about him because they themselves, lacking real intellectual rigour, are merely sloshing about in their own intellectual shallows.
Larkin was, and remains, a bad poet. He was also, sadly, a bitter and twisted man given to the joys of both Racism and Fascism.
Oh, publish and be damned!
Ira Maine.