Philip Larkin
Has a new “Complete” edition of his poems coming out. The Guardian has their review up. I could also be totally confused, but I believe it’s also like 700 pages or something. Jesus.
In other corners of the internet, Francis-Noël Thomas writes that
What Larkin said of Betjeman’s relation with the reading public is true of his own. “In this century English poetry,” Larkin maintained, “went off on a loop-line that took it away from the general reader.” He offers several “reasons.” The first, “the aberration of modernism, that blighted all the arts,” simply begs the question; the second, “the emergence of English literature as an academic subject, and the consequent demand for a kind of poetry that needed elucidation” reflects his own rejection of modernism and his antipathy for academic criticism.
It is arguable, Larkin adds, “that Betjeman was the writer who knocked over the ‘No Road Through to Real Life’ signs that the new tradition had erected, and who restored direct intelligible communication to poetry.” Arguable, but Larkin might as well be talking about himself here. Betjeman remains largely a British—even a specifically English—writer; Larkin, for all his dramatized provincialism, has been embraced by the whole English-speaking world.
