SOURCE: "Style and Language," in An Uncommon Poet for the Common Man: A Study of Philip Larkin 's Poetry, 191 A, pp. 19-42.

[Below, Kuby examines Larkin's place among British poets, specifically his relationship to the modernist school.]

Facets of Larkin's style point to several progenitors. In many ways his differences from the modern tradition resemble Ben Jonson's differences from his own contemporaries. Both tend to avoid extended metaphor, strings of similes, and other rhetorical elaborations which in Jonson's time were called 'conceits', or 'bravery' of language. The poems of both have prose sense and a ready surface intelligibility due, in part, in both cases, to the fact that the poems are organized by rational rather than by emotional or imagistic sequences. Both express themselves succinct ly, attempting, as Jonson put it, "what man can say / In a little", the poetic impulse being toward reduction and condensation rather than expansion and extension ["Epitaph on Elizabeth, L.H."]. Neither depends on single, striking lines and memorable phrases to carry the meaning. Jonson's couplets, even the final couplets of epigrams, do not explain the poem. And of Larkin, G. S. Fraser says [in Vision and Rhetoric, 1959]: "[the] poem moves us as a complex whole…. There is nothing, or almost nothing, that we 'apprehend' in the poem before we have 'comprehended' it. There are no single lines and images that flash out at us." Moreover, he is a moralist like Jonson who

makes of his theater a kind of complicated moral machine for projecting human behavior onto a screen so constituted as to reveal the true nature of that behavior, a nature always kept hidden by the distorted perspectives of mundane interests and commitments.

[John Hollander, Ben Jonson, 1961]

From Jonson one traces many of Larkin's general qualities through Dryden and Pope, the Augustans, down through the early nineteenth century poet, Praed, whom Larkin admires and whose best poems are "vers de société" written in the Augustan vein and character sketches reminiscent of the Spectator Papers:

Some public principles he had
But was no flatterer, no fretter
He rapped his box when things were bad,
And said "I cannot make them better!"
[Praed, "Quince"]

What accounts perhaps more for Larkin's admiration of Praed are a number of poems in the form of gossipy verse letters, a species of less profound dramatic monologue which satirize the prejudices or mannerisms of the fictional writer. In "The Talented Man", for example, a young woman claims to be enchanted with a "clever, new, poet" whose talent, she avers, compensates for his physical unattractiveness: "He's lame,—but Lord Byron was lame, love, / And dumpy,—but so is Tom Moore." Yet, she concludes, he has a defect for which talent cannot compensate:

P.S.—I have found, on reflection,
One fault in my friend,—entre nous
Without it, he'd just be perfection;—
Poor fellow, he has not a sou:

Larkin, too, writes a type of dramatic monologue, though less obviously sarcastic, far more complex than Praed's, and directed to the middle class as opposed to the leisured, fashionable, late Augustan sophisticates and their provincial imitators whom Praed addressed.

Praed's poetry, according to Kenneth Allott [in Selected Poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, 1953], contains exactly that world which Wordsworth says he ignores:

The things which I have taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, on foot or in carraige; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election or the borough of Honiton? … What have they to do … with a life without love?

It may come as a surprise then, one of those unsettling critical contradictions, to find Larkin's name linked also with Wordsworth's. There is, however, some resemblance to both poets. Robert Spector and Christopher Ricks say correctly that "Larkin is committed to portraying life in the language of people, presenting the ordinary in an unusual way" [Spector, "A Way to Say What a Man Can See," Saturday Review, Vol. XLVIII, Feb. 13, 1965]. "They have a Wordsworthian subject, the ordinary sorrow of man's life" [Ricks, "A True Poet," N.Y. Review of Books, Vol. III, Jan. 14, 1965]. Certainly Larkin, like Words-worth, presents the ordinary sorrows of ordinary life, and his tone (perhaps better defined as undertone) is like Wordsworth's, tender and serious. With some exceptions, it is without Praed's briskness and assertiveness, soft while Praed's is loud. And his vocabulary, like Wordsworth's, is highly suggestive, whereas Praed's is highly denotative. On the other hand, Larkin's wry humor and self-mockery, utterly absent in Wordsworth, are found in Praed:

Our love was like most other loves;—
A little glow, a little shiver,
A rose-bud, and a pair of gloves,
Some hopes of dying broken-hearted;
A miniature, a lock of hair,
The usual vows, and then we parted.
["The Belle of the Ballroom"]

Most unlike Wordsworth, however, is Larkin's treatment of the ordinary. No matter how average Wordsworth's characters are, or how simple their pursuits, they come "trailing clouds of glory". That combination of the ordinary and the glorious is what makes Wordsworth Wordsworth. He invests triviality with a luminescence derived from a spiritual universe. Larkin's universe is bleak if not black. His vision is more like Frost's than Wordsworth's, and uncannily like Hardy's.

Among the Victorians, there is a resemblance of Larkin to Browning, though, indeed, disregrading the Aesthetes, there is a resemblance to the moral seriousness which distinguishes Victorian novels and poetry alike. "Seriousness", [A. O. J.] Cockshut says of George Eliot, was one of her "key words, and is, in general, a word indicating a thread of continuity between eightteenth century piety … firmly based on a religious faith … and the unreligious morality of George Eliot" [The Unbelievers, 1966]. As much could be said of Larkin. In fact he says it himself at the end of "Church Going":

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious.

With Browning Larkin shares not only moral seriousness but the method of revealing it through dramatic monologue. The speakers in "Mr Bleaney", "Selfs the Man", "Dockery and Son", to mention a few, expose their limitations, their self-centeredness, the flaws in their morality or vision in much the same way Browning's "Bishop" or "duke" or "Fra Lippo Lippi" do by dramatizing their personalities in response to a situation, idea, or event.

But it is Hardy that occupies a special place among Larkin's literary forebears. Lumping Larkin together with the 'Poets of the Fifties' again, [D. J.] Enright says they "represent a revival of a tradition associated with Hardy and kept alive only through the vigour and persistence of poets like Robert Graves" [Conspirators and Poets, 1966]. Similarities of other poets of the Fifties to Hardy is debatable, but Larkin admits his strong influence. After The North Ship, he says, "I looked to Hardy rather than Yeats as my ideal, and eventually a more rational approach, less hysterical and emphatic, asserted itself. Though there remains some 'Yeatsian music' in Larkin's poetry, it occurs as climax or emphasis in contrast to preceding more halting conversational rhythms. A comparison of several lines of Larkin's "Mr Bleaney" with several lines from "Sailing to Byzantium" reveals that the music in both depends, to a great extent, on the frequent repetition of identical vowel sounds (in Larkin's case, nine high front vowels, (i), in a total of forty syllables; and in Yeats' case, six mid back vowels, (o), in the same number of syllables), and on the close correlation between poetic meter (varied iambic) and prose meter (closely approximating varied iambic). In the following scansion, primary prose stresses are below the line, and those indicating the patterned meter above:

But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread …

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.

This passage, however, is not typical of Larkin's later style which is less regular metrically and less repetitive of sound:

Fall to within five inches of the sill,

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered. "Mr Bleaney took
My bit of garden properly in hand".
Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook

Behind the door, no room for books or bags—
"I'll take it". So it happens that I lie …

From Hardy, Larkin may have learned colloquialness, restraint of lyricism, and the inclusion within the poem of its motivating setting or situation (although many of Larkin's later poems, "Next, Please", "Going", "Wants", are thoughts with no situational specifics, and some that precede Hardy's influence, "XXXII", "XX", present, as Hardy's often do, stage settings for the poetic action). Also, occasionally, direct echoes of Hardy's language or imagery can be traced. For example, the dialogue in Hardy's "Two Houses":

"—Will the day come",
Said the new one, awstruck, faint,
"When I shall lodge shades dim and dumb—"

"—That will it, boy;
Such shades will people thee …"

sounds like the dialogue in Larkin's "Send No Money":

Tell me the truth, I said,
Teach me the way things go.

So he patted my head, booming Boy
There's no green in your eye.

In the same poem Hardy uses a house to represent a human being upon whom others "print … their presences". Larkin uses the same image in "Home is So Sad" in which a house, like a person, is "Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back". Again, echoing Hardy's "The Minute Before Meeting":

And knowing that what is now about to be
Will all have been in O, so short a space!
I read beyond it my despondency.

Larkin says in "Triple Time":

This is the future furthest childhood saw
And on another day will be the past,
A valley cropped by fat neglected chances.

And again, Larkin's

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.

is reminiscent of Hardy's "He Abjures Love":

—I speak as one who plumbs
Life's dim profound,
One who at length can sound
Clear views and certain.
But—after love what comes?
A few saw vacant hours,
And then, the Curtain.

What the above quotations make clear, beyond similarities of style, mood, diction, is that either Hardy had a profound influence on Larkin's view of life, or that Larkin found mirrored in Hardy a startling coincidence to his own view. For Larkin, as for Hardy, it is a view of the "tragic groundwork of existence".

Although the poems of both appeared when their respective era's doubts and anxieties were widely, if not universally, felt, their negativism (Hardy's expression of the 'breakdown of Victorianism', and Larkin's of the emptiness of the mechanical age, which is, in fact, a continuation and intensification of the same breakdown) is singled out for critical reproach. Hardy became extremely sensitive to what he felt was both misreading and adverse moral judgment, and in Winter Words (1928) devoted a section of his preface to denying the allegation that he was an unrelieved pessimist whose "anecdotes and episodes … reveal a perverse preoccupation with 'life's little ironies' and a prepossession with gloom". Larkin's critics sound a variation on the same theme: "typical of a younger group of self-snubbers and self-loathers…. It is another turn on that petty bitterness about life" [M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets, I960]; "determinedly and successfully glum" [Enright]. Interestingly, the terms of critical approbation applied to one, can, with little alteration, apply to the other:

Life's meaningless and man's ignorance are in some obscurely moving way celebrated by being recorded.

["Undeceived Poet," London Times Literary Supplement, Vol. LXIII, March 12, 1964]

Its chief characteristic is a 'satisfying flatness'. It is 'satisfying' because it presents the interesting spectacle of a mind continually probing and exploring; while its 'flatness' is produced by the persistent pressure of the Spirit of Negation.

[A. C. Ward, Twentieth-Century English Literature 1901-1960, 1964]

Larkin would not quarrel with Hardy that "the road to a true philosophy of life seems to be in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced on us by chance or change" [Harold Child, Thomas Hardy, 1916]. Their poems do not present, perhaps do not derive from, a unified philosophy. But both have a habitual way of looking at things which certainly amounts to a philosophy. They share an anguished view of an unspiritual universe in which the terms 'good' and 'evil' have no applicability outside of the small cage of man's cranium, and in only one small portion of even that. Nature, history, society, the other portion of man himself move in accordance with an inexorable and unconscious law whose goal, it seems, is nothing less absurd than movement itself. Hardy's idea of a "Vast Imbecility", a "neutral Spinner of Years", a "sightless Mother", occurs in Larkin too. But whereas Hardy conceived of nature as blind Will seeking only its own perpetuation, Larkin sees it as blind cycles, caring not for its own preservation but moving through endless revolutions of generation and extinction that "shift to giant ribbing, sift away". To Larkin, it is not so much in conflict with man's reason as with man's ability to conceive the impossible—his idealism. In contrast with Hardy, it is the idealizing capacity of man's mind not his reason that makes him a "freak of nature".

Larkin's negativism is, if anything, more pervasive than Hardy's, but then the times in which he lives are more negative. Certain strengths of Hardy's world which occur in his poetry and novels, in Larkin's world no longer exist. The ruins of an old Roman Theater and an old Roman road, traces of the Napoleonic Wars, folk customs and superstitions, the permanence of natural objects, ponds, rocks, trees, were to Hardy poignant reminders of the individual's oblivion in time and of the absence of moral progress in nature; but they were also evidence of continuity and of man's identification with his past. Larkin too sees nature as non-evolving, but sees the environment as having changed for the worse. The very landscape of the twentieth century bespeaks an insuturable cut from the past: "I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign / That this was still the town that had been 'mine' / So long." Event is not anchored in place as it so forcefully is in Hardy's poems; memory loses its referent in the external world, while the quick and easy transportability of things and the extreme mobility of people further intensifies the sense of disconnection: "Hurrying to catch my comet", "traffic all night north", we "met at numerous Cathedral cities". Not living in a fully mechanized, technological society, Hardy, in his world, was surrounded by artifacts that retained the values of durability and association with human personality, though even at that time Rilke (whose life span corresponds to the later fifty years of Hardy's) could say [in a letter to von Hulewicz, quoted in Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern, 1963]:

For our grandfathers, a house, a fountain, a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat, was infinitely more, infinitely more intimate…. The lived and living things, the things that share our thoughts, these are on the decline and can no more be replaced.

In Larkin's world, Rilke's prediction has come completely true. The 'decay of values' applies not only to moral and religious values but to the universal cheapening and vulgarization of those material things that are prized or desired. The sleazy quality of objects built not to last; the "comic Ford", "Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes", the saucer-souvenir" are the artifacts which surround Larkin.

Hardy sets his characters down in geological time, time measured by the formation of the moors and hills, Stonehenge, the Bible. Larkin's characters measure time by a photograph album, a train ride, an old phonograph record. The quality of eternal permanence about the places and things in Hardy's world has given way to a madly accelerated tempo in which present things, experiences, places, ideas 'turn to past'. Larkin's world partakes actively of oblivion, emphasizes death.

In a sense, the negativism of Larkin's view is greater because his characters do not willingly succumb. Often Hardy's poems sink under the pressure of a pre-vision, the dark shape of the universe which exists in Hardy's mind and of which the poems are small exterior models. He boxes his personae into contrived situations which seem superimposed upon reality and not ordinarily experienced in the terms in which he presents them by the average life. And he freezes them in Laocoon-like anguish which offers no possibility of escape from their author's labels, "Time's Laughingstocks" and "bond-servants of chance". Larkin, by recreating the building processes rather than the accomplished model of a dark universe, presents to the realist no easy exit. Whatever cynicism and despair is expressed grows out of situations so mundane and universal; misinterpreted laughter, a room that signifies penury, routine domesticity, an invitation to a houseparty, that no one fails to recognize them. Within these situations the embattled minds of his personae grapple with questions of free will and fate, neither one of which is accepted as the final answer. No sooner is one emotion or idea proposed as the truth, then it grimaces at the speaker with the leer of a lie. No sooner is another discarded as a lie then it buds into a small truth. Both in their mental vacillations and in the audacious humor with which they often confront despair, Larkin's characters resist the idea of their own victimization which Hardy's characters too often appear to welcome. What keeps Larkin's poems afloat is that continuous, convoluted movement of minds which press through self-deception, rationalization, recrimination, and defense, exposing the partiality of every 'position', toward what the poems discover as the fundamental ambiguity—man's fate and his will.

Perhaps the broadest definition of the Movement, one that would include Larkin, is to call it exactly what Dylan Thomas is not (in fact Thomas is a frequent favorite target of theirs). Larkin's poetry is not visionary, vatic, subjective, emotional, or wordy. It continues that strain of British poetry that emphasizes thoughtfulness, plain language, moral consciousness, and reason. It is skeptical rather than optimistic: it sees the universe as physical process rather than as sacred harmony; and it sees humanity as small, unheroic, selfish, anxious, pathetic, and conflicted. Its plainness of language and reasonableness of style reflect skepticism in a way that lyricism and poetic diction cannot. Larkin regards his own worst fault as "lack of resonance". To the extent that resonance in poetry implies lyricism, one can see that Larkin's 'lack' is an inescapable part of his unillusioned view; for irrespective of the meaning of the words involved, the sound of resonance, its musical and rhythmic force, is the nonsemantic sound of faith, optimism, harmony.

The reason behind Larkin's plain style, what may be called its "raison d'éthique", is implicit in his poems and is based upon the condition of the world as he sees it. Orwell made a statement of that condition in the mid 1940's:

Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism whatever. Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred, cruelty and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are only now entering the European consciousness. It is quite possible that man's major problems will never be solved.

[Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade, 1958]

Rejection of a style that employs eloquence, exhalted emotionalism, baroque diction, is less a rejection of these rhetorical items per se than it is a recognition that they imply optimism and hope. They ring false to contemporary poetic sensibility. They seem an attempt to will into existence, or to shout into existence through sheer power of voice, universal harmony that does not exist. In Larkin's poems there is little of the type of resonance heard in Thomas's "Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; / Break in the sun till the sun breaks down" to cover the roar of what is to Larkin cosmic emptiness: "Oh attics cleared of me. Oh absences!"

That is not to say that there is no lyricism in Larkin's poems, but his persistent refusal to allow the individual voice to be swallowed by eternal harmonies is reflected in their dialogical mode as well as in their imagery. Moustached women, puking boys, cart-ruts in mud-lanes resist transformation into something wonderful and strange. And the perplexed, argumentative, searching talk of the poems: "It may be that through habit these do best", "The difficult part of love is being selfish enough", "Too subtle that, too decent too. Oh hell", unlike the voice of celebration or reverie is a sour, off-key note in the close harmony of the spheres. Yet when Larkin's voices move from the idiosyncracies of speech with maximal voice print into the lyrical endings of The Whitsun Weddings, "Dublinesque", or "At Grass", the movement is felt by contrast to be of great weight and significance, inherently both a loss and a gain which the paradoxical life-death imagery of the closing of the poems reinforces.

Perhaps both Hardy's influence and the unavoidable truth of Orwell's statement are accountable for the fact that Larkin has skipped over or rejected the more startling innovations in English literature as practiced by Pound, Eliot, Sitwell, Joyce—the leaders of the Poetic Revolution. Although he is associated with a group of poets called the 'New Formalists' or 'New Traditionalists', Larkin's brand of modernism seems less a throw-back to earlier principles, as the term 'neo' would imply, than new growth on an old traditional tree, with differences resulting naturally in its adaptation to new forces in the environment. The more radical departures of the Poetic Revolution—the disappearance of a clear element of rational meaning; cryptic, esoteric, and erudite allusions; disconnected collage of images; eccentric vocabulary—are not characteristics of Larkin's poetry. 'Modern' elements that do appear—irregular meter, diminished melodiousness, irony, puns, and idiomatic language—while promoted by Pound, Eliot, et al, certainly are not innovations.

Structurally, Larkin's poems combine the traditional and the modern. He occasionally writes in a manner that resembles free verse, but the form is never entirely freed. For example, "Water", which is metrically and syllabically free, retains strict stanza divisions that conform to thought moving logically:

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes.

"Coming", which is as close as Larkin gets to free verse, employs a basic five syllable line and three rhymed pairs, two of them widely separated, in a poem of nineteen lines: "reconciling / nothing", "evenings / sings", "serene / scene".

For the most part, however, his poems are basically iambic, basically rhymed, and basically stanzaic; and his most telling formal characteristic is to free the poems from these bases. Formal tension exists not only between prose and poetic meter, but between symmetry and asymmetry throughout the poem. For example, freed rhythm might return to the iambus as a touchstone:

Well, useful to get that learnt.
In my wallet are still two snaps
Of bosomy rose with fur gloves on.
Unlucky charms, perhaps.
("Wild Oats")

Or stanza divisions will be strictly even but conclude in a run-on line so that the stanza's conventional function of thought or image shift is combined with non-stanzaic continuity:

… Surely, to think the lion's share
Of happiness is found by couples—sheer

Inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned.
("Reasons for Attendance")

Or slant rhyme or the repetition of final consonants only will settle into hard rhyme:

The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on, …

Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses—
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn't suit me.
("Toads Revisted")

But it is Larkin's language rather than his forms that breaks most sharply with the modernisms practiced not only by the leaders of the Poetic Revolution but by their successors, Empson, Auden, Thomas, who are alike, as different from each other they are in other respects, in employing a language composed of extraordinary phrases, uncommon words, and confounding combinations of ordinary words. Although Larkin states that The Movement, "if it had any real core at all, was essentially a reversion to the virtues of the thirties", and that his own poetic education was "in the Auden tradition—objective, outward-looking, political, materialist, unpretentious", his language is of the variety "kept alive by Graves" [Judith Anne Johnson, unpubl. thesis]. And it is [Robert] Graves, after all, who most vocally attacks modernist language as "cloacinal ranting, snook-cocking, pseudo-professional jargon" and "incrustations of nonsense … double talk" ["These be your Gods"]. Whether or not The Movement was a reversion to "something of the style of Empson" [Johnson thesis] as Larkin says, in view of certain other of his statements it seems he would have to agree with [Charles] Tomlinson that Empson's "development has consisted largely of a retreat into style…. The object of the poems tends to disappear, as in the early Letter II and the later Bacchus with its crossword puzzle approach and its six pages of notes, and we are left with a handful of conceits" ["Poetry Today," The Modern Age, 1961]. Tomlinson's objection to Empson's style may be more specifically directed against Empson's choice and combination of words:

Roll not the abdominal wall; the walls of Troy
Lead, since a plumb-line ordered, could destroy.
Roll rather, where no mole dare sap, the lawn,
And ne'er his tumuli shall tomb your brawn.

Larkin's own disenchantment with Auden is largely an exasperation with linguistic conundrums. Auden changed, Larkin says [in "What's Become of Wystan," The Spectator, Vol. CCV, July 15, 1960],

from a social poet full of energetic, unliterary knock-about and unique lucidity of phrase [to one who is] too verbose to be memorable.

For some time he has insisted that poetry is a game, with the elements of a crossword puzzle; it is 'luck of verbal playing'. One need not be a romantic to suspect that this attitude will produce poetry exactly answering to that description.

It is unfortunate that Robert Conquest dragged out the banner, "the language of men", to wave over the poets in New Lines. It was already soiled when Wordsworth used it, and is by now so tattered and splattered as to make the poets who march under it indistinguishable. The language of men is, after all, all language, and if Conquest meant by that phrase the words and rhythms of average conversation then he means a language that has been attributed to Pope, Browning, Frost, Wordsworth, Whitman, and many others. The phrase unquestionably applies to Larkin but it does little to indicate his uniqueness or the nature of his linguistic break with modernism. Larkin writes poetry which communicates primarily to the mind, not to the intellectual mind, but to the understanding, the mind that apprehends idea in experience. To do so requires a language that derives from thought rather than from dream or from the Freudian or Jungian unconscious. It cannot be a language which by its very nature resists being understood. It is exactly that language which defenders of modernism object to. In an oblique negative reference to The Movement, Spender says:

Poetry itself is invaded by the prose idea, the reaction against what is dismissed as a period of 'experiment'. The reaction is called 'consolidation' or the revival of 'traditionalism', or 'correctness' or 'clarity'. But of course behind these labels is the assumption that it is possible to be clear in a period of confusion, that it is possible to be traditional when the line of tradition has been fragmented, that it is possible to consolidate the 'experiments' of Joyce.

A similar explanation is offered by G. S. Fraser for Surrealistic poetry such as the following by J. F. Hendry:
Cast in a dice of bones I see the geese of Europe
Gabble in skeleton jigsaw, and their battered anger
Scream a shark-teeth frost through splintering earth and lips.

"The obscurity of our poetry", Fraser says, "its air of something desperately snatched from dream or woven round a chime of words, are the results of disintegration, not in ourselves but in society" [Quoted by Tomlinson].

The point of Larkin's "traditionalism", "correctness", "clarity", to use Spender's words, is not that these are formalist "causes célé bres" but that they are the means of writing communicative poetry. The point of Joyce's (novels), Pound's, Eliot's, often Thomas's and Yeats's, the post Symbolists' and Surrealists' poetry is that in their search for the prophetic, or mystical, or subconscious-tapping word, the word which in some way was to harmonize or reintegrate cultural disintegration, they tended to compound that disintegration. Not only were their results often not understandable with reference to experience but their efforts led to highly subjective poems which were finally understood only by the writer. On this score, Larkin comments [in All What Jazz, 1970]:

Modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso … helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous.

One trend of Modernism, typified by Joyce and Thomas (following Hopkins), has been the baroque piling up of words with the aim of arriving at the 'whatness', or 'essence', or 'inscape' of whatever is perceived or felt:

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave's foot.
[Dylan Thomas, "In Memory of Ann Jones"]

With futurist onehorse balletbattle pictures

Ben Dollard's voice barreltone … Croak of vast manless moonless womoonless marsh.
(Lines from Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses)

The search for the right word, the perfect word, is, in these examples, part of the piece itself, a component of the finished product. Larkin's traditionalism, or what may be called 'classicism' in this respect, is that the search for the word goes on outside the poem. The process of groping, paring away, discarding, comparing remains in the author's mind. What appears in the poem is the final word, convincing because it is decisive:

Then begins
A snivel on the violins: …

or

On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.

or

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar.

Even these fragments expose by comparison with the quotations from Thomas and Joyce a quality of frenzied search for the always elusive word. In contrast, Larkin's language demonstrates the usability of usual words. The ease and simplicity of his language implies faith in the communicability of words existing in the common idiom which, in spite of the poems' expressions of despair, resignation, or absurdity, serves as a reintegration of values.

Larkin also diverges from the effect on its language of the Poetic Revolution's loudly proclaimed reaction against Victorian 'narcissism', and 'romantic egotism'. Again the reaction tended to become an exaggeration and extension of the fault elaborately hidden behind a surface of new techniques. No Victorian carried narcissism or subjectivity so far as Joyce, Pound, or Yeats in their inventions of language so private and symbolic images so personal as to be indecipherable even to a highly educated audience. The outer limits of egotism are reached in Finnegan's Wake which insists that all men learn one man's language; in Pound's Cantos in which the images insist, "it is so because I say it is so, no referential proof necessary"; and in those of Yeats's poems which refer to privately invented mythology.

Larkin's language avoids just such subjectivity. His most personal poems are universalized by speaking in the vernacular. He obviously eschews sentimentality and the other 'excesses' that fill the Victorian Golden Treasury, but he does not make the modern error of confusing sentimentality with subjectivity. Though sentimentality seems egotistically to assume that the writer's own emotions will be shared by all, its success with the public proves that it is quite right in that assumption. In one sense sentimentality is the farthest extreme from subjectivity since what it taps into is the norm of a universal or cultural pat response with none of the complications of individual responses. Stock response is evoked by the use of the most commonplace language and the most commonplace images possible. In "I Remember, I Remember", as elsewhere, Larkin counters sentimentality on its own grounds. In contrast with Modernists who escape sentimentality by using private languages and esoteric imagery, he shows stock response to be false by presenting an alternative viewpoint in common language. In doing so he revalidates the effectiveness of the language men speak:

Our garden first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest.

One of the possible pitfalls of language as simple as Larkin's is pointed out by [David] Daiches [in The Present Age in British Literature, 1965]:

A superficial clarity may be the result of depending too heavily on shop-worn words and idioms which appear to have a poetic meaning but which in fact on repeated and careful reading can be seen to lack all precision, and individuality.

Larkin often uses "shop-worn words" as the above quotation and the one following indicate:
No, I have never found
The place where I could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay;
Nor met that special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name.
("Places, Loved Ones")

But the meanings of the poems do not ride on individual words. Phrasing, the unique turn of thought, dialectic between thoughts, and fluctuations in tone of voice renew shop-worn words. At any rate the pitfall of clarity is less dangerous, and certainly less an affront to the reader, than the pit that is emptied of meaning once the riddle of diction is removed.

Larkin also departs from modernist practices that attend closely to Pound's warning, "go in fear of an abstraction ". "Days", "Ignorance", "Places, Loved Ones", "Next, Please", among many others, are full of abstract language:

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching: every day
Till then we say.
("Next, Please")

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or, Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.
("Ignorance")

Such abstract language is appropriate to the subject which is the Never Happened, the Always Wished For, the tragic discrepancy between the ideal and the real.

Larkin's reversion to pre-modernist use of language allows him to achieve, in addition to objectivity and communicativeness, tonal range. Using as his base a median, conversational English, he can ascend and descend without climbing too high or dropping too low. Slight modulations suffice to create dramatic shifts in mood and tone. In "Wedding Wind", for example, rising emotion is suggested without exaggeration by the lines: "Shall I be let to sleep / Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?" because they have been preceded by the easy prosiness of "a stable door was banging, again and again / … and I / Carry a chipped pail to the chicken-run". In "Church Going", for another example, a tone of flippancy, "some brass and stuff / Up at the holy end", is altered to one of gravity, "A serious house on serious earth it is", without departing radically from the linguistic norm of the poem: "Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, / When churches fall completely out of use / What we shall turn them into".

Larkin's language may be called both democratic and moral. It is democratized by its intelligibility to the general reading public, and moral in not "blarneying its way'. It is not the language of the intellectual elite, nor that of the confidence man. It is morality that 'squats' in the language of the poems which, as Larkin puts it in another context in "Toads", "will never allow me to blarney / My way to getting / The fame and the girl and the money / All at one sitting", and which, in an important way, separates it from the language of the Poetic Revolution.

The second most important aspect of Larkin's 'traditionalism' is his shifting away from another Modernist dogma—the absolute importance placed on concreteness, 'thinginess', or Dinglichkeit. Pound decreed that the vehicle of poetry was to be things: objects, whether taken from dream, fancy, or reality, were to stand in for states of mind or emotion. Pound's contemporary English Symbolists, the Imagists, the later Surrealists, and virtually all poetry since then, as the following recent examples show, have served that principle with unquestioning allegiance. Presentation of idea without its embodiment in the 'objective correlative' of a Thing practically vanished from poetry:

The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land
Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake,
Treed with iron and birdless. In the sunk lane
The ditch—a seep silent all summer—
[Ted Hughes, "November"]

White, these villages. White
their churches without altars. The first snow
falls through a grey-white sky
and birch-twig whiteness turns
whiter against the grey. White
the row of pillars.
[Charles Tomlinson, "In Connecticut"]

The disappearance of the speech of thought, as such, and its replacement by what in a broad sense must be called 'description' contributes, along with experiments in language, to the obfuscation of meaning in modern poetry. Except in the greatest of Dinglichkeit poetry such as "Prufrock", the importance of tone of voice in the dramatization of human personality has been usurped by things. In Larkin's poems, tone of voice, above all, is important. He verifies human personality by liberating speech from things. He can write lines in which not a 'thing' appears:

Therefore I stay outside
Believing this; and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.
("Reasons for Attendance")

Parting, after about five
Rehearsals, was an agreement
That I was too selfish, withdrawn,
And easily bored to love.
("Wild Oats")

Not that Larkin avoids imagistic writing, but he brings it into conjunction with that straight speech of thought-without-pictures which is all but absent in modern tradition but which is part and parcel of the tradition before 1914. Larkin's descriptions are vivid and accurate:

Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered.
("Mr Bleaney")

But description is there for the purpose of grounding a state of mind in reality. The poem goes on to what is humanly important, a question, an answer, a speculation:

Telling himself that this was home, and grinned,
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature.

The great emphasis on things in modern poetry seems to spring from the same source as the fear of the failure of language. In a world of dissolving values, things—the sensible properties of sheer materiality—become the bases of psychic security. Yet, paradoxically, things are emptied of psychic value. Fear seems evident in such statements as the following [by William Dickey, "Poetic Language," Hudson Review, Vol. XVII, 1964-65]:

This ability to see is neither easy nor usual, and it represents one of the most important ways in which the floating world of poetic language can be given a persistent human relevance, a persistent reference back to the solidities of existence.

That statement refers to Ciardi's lines in "Person to Person":

Morning glories, pale as a mist drying
fade from the heat of the day, but already
hunchback bees in pirate pants and with peg-leg
hooks have found and are boarding them.

Similarly, [Anne] Stevenson praises Elizabeth Bishop's "pre-occupation with the surfaces of things", and with "what can be suggested by a selection and presentation of surface" [Elizabeth Bishop, 1966]. Typical of the resulting poetry are these lines from "Fish":

his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.

And Rosenthal says of Tomlinson [in The New Poets, 1967], comparing him with Larkin to the latter's disadvantage:

The mood, the readiness for perception, requires a certain restraint of personality … so that the eye … may be as responsive as possible…. Tomlinson holds the advantage of making his poem a discovery of concrete phenomenon.

Rosenthal's example of Tomlinson's "eye" is:

Larkin himself comes in for both praise or censure depending upon how closely he conforms to the contemporary critical bias in favor of 'things'. Rosemary Dean praises the authenticity of "bleached / Established names on sunblinds" [Commonweal, Vol. LXXXI, Dec. 25, 1964]. And Enright applauds the concreteness of "the reek of buttoned carriage seats". Starting with a similar premise, Rosenthal censures "Here" because, he says:

It is as though Larkin had suddenly remembered his gloomy tenets and snapped himself out of delighted absorption in reality … in the excitement of sense-awareness as Williams might have done.

In its fear of the absence of shared values or of universally similar states of mind, modern poetry's attempts to find a common objective ground in the things of the external world has tended to become more subjective on less common ground. Ciardi's striving for concreteness in the image of bees quoted above, for example, results in the subjectivity he probably was trying to avoid. To some eyes, bees may look hunchbacked, and in the "impossible endlessness of observation" the balloon-shaped protrusions of fuzz on their legs may be seen as resembling pirate pants [A. Alvarez, The Shaping Spirit, 1958]. But they may also be seen as resembling harem pants, or Dutchboy pants, or what have you. The critical question must be: what has made Ciardi see them as pirate pants and not as something else which fancy can equally justify? How does the meaning of the poem—if it has a meaning beyond fanciful, imagistic simile—justify that particular fancy? How is significance built out of the image he has chosen? Another question must be: beyond the rather far-fetched visual resemblance, what is there about the nature of bees and the act in which they are engaged which is like the act of pirates? Though they 'board' their object and carry off something from it, it is difficult to think of a life activity that cannot be seen in the same way. And unlike pirates, they neither ravage nor destroy. The nautical word "board" is used in an effort to validate the metaphor by extending it, but it remains, along with the peculiar vision of "Morning glories" as ships, arbitrary and subjective.

The resemblance between these fragments by Hughes, Tomlinson, Bishop, and Ciardi to the touchstone of imagist poetry, the complete fragment, Pound's "Station of the Metro": "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough", is that they are provocative sensory stimuli which evoke in the reader an emotion or idea that may or may not be the one the author buried in the image. Larkin's reintroduction of thought into the surface of the poem produces a symbiotic relationship between idea and image which recreates connectedness between the internal and external world, not only of the speaker, but of the reader. The lines from "Mr Bleaney", quoted above, show how Larkin picks out of the event or environment those details which contribute to an experience that involves not only seeing, but cognition. With few exceptions ("Age", "If, My Darling"), Larkin's imagery is not psyche symbolizing itself, projecting from itself a subjective psychological landscape, but verifiable reality to which mind and mood react. The terms of the poetic image testify to a certain state of mind; but approached through the additional avenues of tone of voice and articulated thought, the state of mind verifies the image, disallowing idiosyncratic sight.

One other by-product of the modern slogan "no ideas but in things" which Larkin avoids is the tendency for emphasis on concreteness to deteriorate into emphasis on sight at the expense of the other senses. The modern poet keeps his eyes open. He is visually aware of his environment. When Donald Hill praises Richard Wilbur's "close disinterested observation", he means his visual perceptiveness—his ability to describe that which is seen. When Rosenthal finds that Larkin's "Send No Money" suffers from "the obvious fact that its mood is anchored in no justifying referent … a voice without a body; there is no dive into the specifics of observation", he is saying that the poet has not embodied his mood in the visual properties of a concrete object. When Stevenson approves Elizabeth Bishop for the "accuracy of her perceptions", she means the accuracy of her eyes.

"Dinglichkeit" in Larkin's poems is not confined to the visual properties of things. There is not only a mind that thinks about what the eyes see, but also olfactory, auditory, and kinesthetic senses. Concreteness includes smell:

A smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage cloth.

Within the terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships

taste:

I changed, / And ate an awful pie

The boy puking his heart out in the Gents

sound:

An uncle shouting smut

That note you hold, narrowing and rising

touch:

Their heads clasped abruptly

sensing the smoke and sweat,
The wonderful feel of girls

and motion:

Palsied old step-takers,
Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters

… as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling.

Larkin is more accurately described as a non-conformist to modernism than as a traditionalist. His poems sound modern: they capture contemporary sensibility and deal with contemporary problems. In his non-conformism, he avoids esoteric language of all kinds—that which is privately invented, and that which is taken from less known classics, mythology, religion. He also avoids over-burdening his poems with 'things' at the expense of thought and tone of voice. At bottom his non-conformism is a return to communicative poetry: there is someone talking and the assumption of someone listening and understanding. It implies faith both that there is an audience and that the audience shares a common tongue viable enough to communicate the full range of experience.