Readers of Philip Larkin's poetry keep writing about it, even though they recognize how simple and clear it is, because they also sense that its most distinctive aspect is indefinable, not just in criticism of the poetry but in the poetry itself. Because this aspect of Larkin's poetry seems by its very nature to be inexpressible, it needs speaking of in as many ways as possible, if the very sense of it is not to lapse. It seems that only the obvious can be said of Larkin, and that everyone who has written on him has said it again and again, in one way or another, since it is as simple and clear as a glass of water. Yet, because it cannot be defined, doubts remain as to whether either his most sympathetic critics … or his more severe … are responding to what makes Larkin's poetry of distinctive value.

Of Larkin himself, however, there can be no doubt. His choice of "Absences" as his own favorite poem for the anthology, Poet's Choice, as early as 1962, indicates that even then he had a sure sense of the indefinable aspect of his poetry that gives it its value. For "Absences" comes closer than any other of Larkin's poems to being explicit about what is inexplicable.

       Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
       Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
       Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
       A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
       Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
       Where there are no ships and no shallows.
 
       Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
       Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
       They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.
 
       Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!
                                            (p. 117)

The poem is "cleared of me," the biographically identifiable ego is absent from it. Yet it is no world, natural or supernatural. It is a very human attending and exclaiming; it is nothing, that unobjectifiable, un-delimitable act of observing, thinking, and speaking. The act itself cannot be seen or heard; in truth, it cannot even be thought, because to think it is to objectify it, to treat it as a mental object or fact, whereas its essential nature, as an act that arches over and assimilates both self and world, is to be irreducible to that which is other than itself, to the posited, to the factual. There is, however, nothing superhuman, Teutonic, or metaphysical about it, even though it is no part of the world…. By alliterating "absences" with "attics," Larkin calls attention to its humanness, even its commonness. It is awesome only in the sense that it is invulnerable, but it is available to any and all who will simply pull back from the existent world and live the invisible, inaudible, inarticulable attending aspect of their humanity along with whatever else they may have to do and suffer in the real, existent human and nonhuman world. Larkin is very careful to help his audience hear the last line in just this, the proper way. The conspicuous alliteration in the last line of the first stanza insures that, as the absence of all human beings is being affirmed, their presence as the indefinable act of viewing the sea as free of all human beings is gently suggested. The sea is made to remind one of a funhouse, with its collapsing floors, its tiltings and drops, its playfulness. The indefinable aspect of the poem, the saving, indefinable aspect of humanity, to which even the vast images of the sea and the sky are inadequate, is safe and homey. It has nothing to do with the fearfulness of nihilism or existentialistic absurdity. It is that absolute security into which the poem leads one to retreat from the meaninglessless of existence, of everything objective, whether ideal or real.

It is not otherworldly, only nonworldly. The "yet more shoreless day" does, of course, have its shores, as does everything in the objective world, whatever its expanse. Even the final exclamation, "Such absences!", is pressed into a delimited shape by the verbal imagining of the undelimitable nothing who does not give himself up even to the poem as object, offering it as a self-consuming artifact, to be broken down along with all selves as entities, and assimilated into the perfect freedom of being invisibly pleased. In such freedom, there is no respect for persons, there is no hierarchic stratification, one and all are anonymous. The most authentic statement Larkin has made outside his poetry is: "I think it's important not to feel crushed." That is the essence of the inexplicable freedom that gives his poems their distinctive value. However silly Larkin is willing to make himself seem within his poems, he is never crushed, because he has his true life in that undelimitable, uncrushable act of attending, of imagining, of speaking. His poems make an appeal, it is true, as though Larkin were an entertainer, who would as a result be subject to anxieties concerning the ups and downs of audience response. If the appeal fails, however, the loss is the reader's, not Larkin's, for he is never fully engaged in any objective situation or encounter, whereby he might be hurt or crushed. The same sort of aloofness indeed is what he offers to all, not as a way of life, but as an aspect of whatever way of life one may be connected with. It is easy of access, and priceless because invulnerable. (pp. 117-19)

[Larkin] accepts the debasement of all objects and images and [in "Solar,"] uses even the supreme object, the sun, in such a way as to reduce it to mere words in the service of his special kind of human freedom. (p. 120)

In "Solar," instead of a beholding of the sun with adoration, Larkin offers the hilarious shenanigans of a verbal artist whipping the silly sun about with metaphorical abandon, shaking it like a baby toy. The word "Solar" itself makes the sun small, shrunken by commerce and science. It is just something hung up there, suspended in a room with no furniture, a naked bulb, but magical, without wires. It may be a "lion face," but it is a comic one, spilling like a sack of wheat, pouring like a salt shaker…. If Larkin's poetry is at times tedious and irritating, it is not because of its chronic sadness, but because of what lies behind it, making it a sham sadness, that is, its gaiety, its jollity, won without effort and held to so jauntily. (pp. 120-21)

If Larkin did, in his maturity, overcome Yeats's influence and write under Hardy's, just as important is the fact that the gaiety which charges Larkin, as it nowhere charges Hardy, resembles that of late harsh poems of Yeats…. (p. 121)

There are no objective correlatives in [Larkin's] poetry. The sun of "Solar" is shown up as deserving dismissal, as incapable of bodying forth indefinable value. Just so, the sea and "shoreless day" of "Absences," instead of symbolizing mental spaciousness, are made to seem amusingly confined and inadequate, in comparison to the illimitable act of seeing them so…. Larkin wants to be sure that no reader takes his images too seriously. Highly-wrought language, a dazzle which might draw a reader swooning and yet alert into the imaginative experience of a poem, as a refuge where he could live happily apart from the pressures of the daily grind, Larkin will never imperil a reader with such a gawdy trap. What Larkin would share with his reader, ultimately, is the act of dismissing all images, all symbols, all realizations, all artifacts, the world itself, as inadequate, as inferior to the freedom of looking, imagining, thinking dismissively.

What makes not just Larkin's poems, but also his ataraxic stance, his sustained act of looking, imagining and thinking dismissively, so unstable is that there is only one form of response appropriate to them. (pp. 122-23)

Larkin feels … righteous about writing a poetry which is preeminently hearable, in a single, soporific way, indifferent to all other ways, especially thoughtful, reflective, critical ways. The aim is pleasure in the form of ease and comfort. One is invited to set aside his larger, human self in its relations with others and with the complexities of his actual situation and to assume the dream-identity of a single, secure audience, a fictitious cloud of unknowing that takes on real existence only as that into which actual readers and listeners escape. (pp. 124-25)

There is, in sum, a weakness in the generosity with which Larkin offers poems that will not disturb his readers. The unstableness of his achievement, moreover, stems from its dependence on his readers' being generous in the same way…. The latent appeal of ["Wants"] is that one accept the not quite stated identification of being alone and being in oblivion without reflecting on it or criticizing it. The condition of oblivious aloneness is, to be sure, a delicate one, is, indeed, an aspect of that aloof, dismissive attentiveness which is the inner value of all Larkin's poetry. (p. 125)

Larkin, writing from within this [aloof] condition as from an impregnable fortress, lures the reader who wants what he has with a strikingly subtle technique. [In "Wants"], the technique is the casual lightness of the assertorial tone of the middle three lines of both stanzas. The alternatives to oblivious aloneness are presented not as irritants that make one want to escape into that state and not as attractions in spite of which one wants to make that escape, but as items waved aside and dismissed as negligible…. Properly read, therefore, six of the ten lines of the poem are so forgettable as to be forgotten by the end of the poem: friends, love, family, living with care in time and in thoughtful relation to one's mortality, all such matters are as nothing compared to the comfort of ataraxic aloofness. To think of them would, in fact, destroy the poetic experience, a crucial part of which is the condition of obliviousness.

If a reader begins to fuss, recognizing that there is no hint in the poem that the nature of any of these aspects of living as a human being in the world has been experienced or even thought about by the large, untouchable, uncrushable self dismissing them, so that the dismissal is totally uncompelling and unconvincing, then one will be breaking the implicit contract of the poem, the assumption that the reader shares the poet's wants and will raise no questions if the poem fulfills them. Larkin's own response to such a reader of bad faith is implicit in the following comment …:

There is nothing like writing poems for realizing how low the level of critical understanding is; maybe the average reader can understand what I say, but the above-average often can't.

His "average reader" is, in my terms, one who keeps the faith, holding to the contract, submissively. His "above average" reader is one who raises questions. In Larkin's terms, to raise questions is to read without understanding, to lack the generosity necessary for the reading of his poetry. He remains invulnerable, no matter what the carping of the critic. Yet that critic raises questions because he has read the poems not only with sympathetic understanding, but also with a reflective, critical understanding of their limitations. His discomfort with the poems, his not understanding them Larkin's way, coincides with his understanding them truthfully.

Even though all Larkin's poems share the instability of being dependent on his actual readers' willingness to occupy unquestioningly the passive position he has reserved for them, it is possible to distinguish the more successful from the less. The more successful will be those poems in which the devices used to bring the reader up to the ataraxia of the poet are inconspicuous. For if the reader notices the devices, as devices, he will become more rather than less alert, a ruinous turn for such poetry. Also, those poems will weather best in which Larkin has most effectively hidden the troublesome moral implications inherent in the dismissive attentiveness into which he would lure his audience, for his sort of euphoria cannot tolerate anything worrisome.

On the grounds, then, of the effective concealment of tricks in the means and of moral disturbances in the end, it should be evident that "Here," the opening poem of The Whitsun Weddings, will prove more durable than the title poem of that volume. Both poems depend on strategies and a moral flaw which must go unnoticed, if the reader is to enjoy the oblivious aloneness of the poems fully. Above all, readers must be kept from puzzling about the nature of the act of observing which is the basis of both poems. (pp. 126-27)

From the start of the poem, Larkin's aim has been to ease his reader into the condition of that true "Here" which is nowhere, that hovering, unspecifiable attending with which the reader is to identify himself unawares. From such an unlocatable locus, the attitude taken toward every object, toward everything objectifiable, not just toward that "cutprice crowd," will be a mixture of pity and contempt. Except that, in principle, every member of that crowd might himself be truly at one with the uncrushable act of observing dismissively, so that, as part of that act, one may be enjoying a false sense of superiority by looking down, as he does, upon the crowd. Even so, it is Larkin who has lured him into that falseness…. He is the one who has made one feel different from and superior to the crowd. He might well weasel, if confronted with this, saying that he did not really mean the contrast, that it was only a manner of speaking. Even admitting the truth of that, one may wonder if it is necessary to the sense of the value of unfenced attending that it be kept in constant contrast to the fenced quality of everything seen, imagined, or thought. One might even wonder whether it isn't a moral uneasiness which makes Larkin come out of the sure comfort of his aloof attentiveness to write poems. Perhaps he writes them so that he can feel superior to them. Or perhaps his comfort is unstable enough to need the reassurance of the belief that others are also of his way of thinking. Perhaps, however, "Here" would not have given rise to any questions at all, if [Donald Davie] had not come at it with the idea that Larkin values the human scene more than the nonhuman scene. The truth, rather, is that Larkin values the human seeing as equally superior to the human and the nonhuman scenes. His weakness is that, because of the oblivious nature of that seeing, he must keep his preference itself hidden, so that it is imperative that his critics keep making mistakes.

Although "The Whitsun Weddings" was intended by Larkin as the centerpiece of The Whitsun Weddings, it is vulnerable as "Here" is not, and, for that matter, as its own counterparts in The Less Deceived and High Windows, "Church Going" and "The Building" are not. Because of his deep revulsion for the objective, existent world, Larkin cannot put himself as an identifiable human being into a poem except as an object of revulsion or at least as the butt of his anonymous mockery. In contrast to what he does in those other poems, in "The Whitsun Weddings," Larkin puts himself into the poem as an individual, observable entity, but without the slightest hint of mockery or revulsion. Even worse, toward the end of the poem, because attention is called to the breadth of the "I"'s awareness, in contrast to the self-absorption of those just married, and because of the ostentatious metaphorical flourish with which the poem ends, this "I," who as an entity existent within the objective world of the poem must have limits like its every other entity, is presented as possessing, as a poet, the value which only the illimitable, anonymous act of attending dismissively can have. As a result, the poem is tainted by smugness. (pp. 129-30)

The real moral problem … does not lie in Larkin's cynicism, but in his observing without being observed…. In "The Whitsun Weddings," however, Larkin takes on the sovereign privileges of invisible, unnameable observing even though he also presents himself as a visible, existent, individual entity. He should have recognized that such a hybrid is inadmissible in poetry the likes of his. By bringing the act of attending into the scene, he has unknowingly committed an obscenity, in the sense that he has brought on stage what by its nature must occur offstage.

The vice is compounded by the self-congratulatory professionalism of the end of the poem…. It is stated as a fact that not one of the dozen couples gave a moment's thought to any of the others. After the statement, however, its unsettling grounds are provided, inadvertently: "I thought of London spread out in the sun, / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat." The thoughtlessness of the twelve couples is not, then, a fact, but rather the claim of this thoughtful "I", who is calling attention to his own attentiveness by way of contrast with all those others, who are much like cattle, self-absorbed, looking without seeing…. Sad it may be, but no significant change has occurred to the married couples. The specialness, the joy, the sacredness of the weddings does not survive the event. The show, the fireworks, the "arrow-shower," turns to rain. It fructifies, there are droppings of human babes, the populace grows and grows, naturally and thoughtlessly, like wheat. The couples copulate, reproduce, and in time will be fathers and mothers on station platforms, waving goodbye to their just married offspring. But the rain which the arrow-shower becomes is also the tears of us superior people, who observe "the association of man and woman / In daunsing, signifying matrimonie—/ A dignified and commodious sacrament" and think of the unchanging cycle: "Feet rising and falling. / Eating and drinking. Dung and death." The change that truly gives power is not that of marriage, but that of poetry. Consider, as the example of the poem, the change from the weary worker whose "three-quartersempty train" pulled out "about / One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday" to the "I" of this ending, loosing from his magnificently broad vision this grand metaphorical display. From just a weary one he has huffed and puffed till he is so big as to include all of England from Hull to London, all of London, and indeed a vision of all of life too. It is a very fine thing to be a poet.

Larkin, it is true, wrote the poem for the comfort of his audience, unreflective viewers rather than unreflective actors and carping critics. In the long run, however, even his own audience will prefer his unpretentious poems, those in which Larkin does not make the mistake of trying to define what is indefinable, of exhibiting what cannot be put on exhibit, that impersonal, invisible, never even quite audible act of observing dismissively. (pp. 131-33)

Merle Brown, "Larkin and His Audience," in The Iowa Review (copyright © 1977, by The University of Iowa), Vol. 8, No. 4, (Fall, 1977), pp. 117-34.