The Less Deceived

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This was a post-war Britain that had lost its Empire, so Larkin’s The Less Deceived almost reflected a sense of living in an isolated motherland. Indeed, Philip Larkin was a man ambling through life with a ponderous glare, capturing the foibles of modern life through a discerning lens and an overwhelming sense that one’s senses were diminishing. “Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles,” he describes the inside of his mind in If My Darling, “Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate.” Accessible but masterful, Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived gave the world poems which were formalist in dealing with relatively ordinary topics, but without it feeling any less poetic for it. In fact, what’s most noteworthy about The Less Deceived is how Larkin has a real instinct for meditative melancholy; each poem acting as an almost philosophical rumination on life’s biggest questions (love, death, etc.) all through the prism of ironic detachment.

I suspect much of my neglect may be due to my knee-jerk preferences in mid-century verse: I favor the American over the British, the surrealist over the rhetorical, the bi-polar over the cynical. But I suspect there are other reasons that run deeper. For years, you see, I strove to be playful, guileless, and ardent. This was hard work at times, and required a steady diet of denial. Larkin's commentary and observations about aging and disappointment and the fears and uncertainties that keep us trapped in conformity despite our wishes for freedom, or desire to get the girl, or hopes (in vain) to evade the disappointment that successive looks in the mirror yield over time--frequently have a (gut) punch line. It's as he said himself, in the aptly named poem entitled I know that what is really important is if I (the reader) enjoy what I read and not necessarily what the literature professors think of something but I still can't help feeling like an intellectual simpleton whenever I approach poetry. Larkin stopped writing poetry shortly after his collection High Windowswas published in 1974. In an Observerobituary, Kingsley Amis characterized the poet as “a man much driven in upon himself, with increasing deafness from early middle age cruelly emphasizing his seclusion.” Small though it is, Larkin’s body of work has “altered our awareness of poetry’s capacity to reflect the contemporary world,” according to London Magazinecorrespondent Roger Garfitt. A.N. Wilson drew a similar conclusion in the Spectator:“Perhaps the reason Larkin made such a great name from so small an oeuvrewas that he so exactly caught the mood of so many of us… Larkin found the perfect voice for expressing our worst fears.” That voice was “stubbornly indigenous,” according to Robert B. Shawin Poetry Nation.Larkin appealed primarily to the British sensibility; he remained unencumbered by any compunction to universalize his poems by adopting a less regional idiom. Perhaps as a consequence, his poetry sells remarkably well in Great Britain, his readers come from all walks of life, and his untimely cancer-related death in 1985 has not diminished his popularity. Andrew Sullivan feels that Larkin “has spoken to the English in a language they can readily understand of the profound self-doubt that this century has given them. He was, of all English poets, a laureate too obvious to need official recognition.” If Rudyard Kipling’s ( 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) is the poetry of empire, then Philip Larkin’s is the poetry of the aftermath of empire. Having lived through the divestiture of England’s various colonial holdings, the economic impact of empire building having finally come home, together with the ultimate travesty of imperial pretensions and the nightmare of Nazi and Soviet colonization in Europe, Larkin was wary of the expansiveness, the acquisitiveness, and the grandeur implicit in the imperial mentality. Many features of his poetry can be traced to that wariness: from the skepticism and irony, to the colloquial diction, to the formal precision of his poems.

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The title of this early collection of Larkin's poems comes from 'Deceptions'--an empathetic reflection on a real-life act of sexual violence ('I would not dare / Console you if I could')--as well as being a reversal of a quote from Hamlet. The poem contains one of the most striking images in the book (with much competition): 'All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives'. The narrator then uses the incident as a starting point from which to launch into a melancholy philosophic meditation on the nature of art, love, death, eternity, etc. Much that is admirable in the best of [Larkin’s] work is felt [in Collected Poems]: firmness and delicacy of cadence, a definite geography, a mutually fortifying congruence between what the language means to say and what it musically embodies,” asserted Seamus Heaneyin the Observer.The collection contains Larkin’s six previous volumes of poetry as well as 83 of his unpublished poems gleaned from notebooks and homemade booklets. The earliest poems (which reflect the style and social concerns of W.H. Auden) date from his schooldays and the latest close to his death. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Books, Alan Shapiropointed out, “Reading the work in total, we can see how Larkin, early and late, is a poet of great and complex feeling.” Larkin “[endowed] the most commonplace objects and occasions with a chilling poignancy, [measuring] daily life with all its tedium and narrowness against the possibilities of feeling,” adds Shapiro. These poems, twenty-nine in all, differ from one another in form, but not in shape. That is, all of them share the same general morphology, consisting of two main parts:

I don’t believe that only a woman can write a woman’s biography, something Sutherland modishly worries about in an afterword (in mitigation for a crime he hasn’t committed, he tells us that he showed his manuscript to feminists such as Jane Miller and Rosie Boycott). It’s possible that a female biographer might have been less timid here, or more empathic, but it’s not certain. Jones is hardly the first clever, beautiful female to have been brought to abjection like this, to have embraced, even to have exalted, such a state as her lot: think of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But women, too, tend to balk at the idea of examining forensically the notion that love sometimes bends us out of shape. The truths involved are too agonising and shameful. Larkin can at times be mordantly humorous. In “If My Darling” he speculates about what his girl might think if she could view the vile contents of his mind (“monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles/ Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate”), in “Toad” he compares his day-job to an intrusive amphibian (“why should I let the toad work squat on my life?), and in “I Remember, I Remember,” he excuses Coventry, the town he lived in for the painfully uneventful first eighteen years of his life, from any specific responsibility (“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”) Osborne, John. Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.Miscellaneous: All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961-1968, 1970; Required Writings: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982, 1984. But even though he cannot believe in God himself, if the churches fell entirely into disuse it would represent a victory for forces he does not precisely define, yet is clearly suspicious of. And a ‘serious house on serious earth’ (as Larkin calls the church) can never be truly obsolete. The Deceived is solidly done and manages to touch gracefully on concerns about (especially emotionally) abusive relationships, power dynamics, coercion and how we navigate ever-changing mores. Ophelia and Michael’s scenes together are particularly well pitched – if she were just a little older and wiser, if he were just a little more obvious or overbearing, or just a little less confident and clever, you could see how they might all escape unscathed. But … Mary M. Macdermott, Vowel Sounds in Poetry: Their Music and Tone-Colour (unpublished Ph. D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 1941 ) vol. 1, pp. 17–18. In 1943 Vernon Watkins came to speak at the Oxford English Club. Larkin was present, and the occasion made a tremendous and lasting impression on him. He never cared much for Watkins's own poems, but he liked the man tremendously, and responded to his enthusiasm for Dylan Thomas and, above all, for W. B. Yeats. ‘Impassioned and imperative, he swamped us with Yeats … I had been tremendously impressed by the evening … As a result, I spent the next three years trying to write like Yeats, not because I liked his personality or understood his ideas, but out of infatuation with his music’ ( RW 29). Much of The North Ship almost sounds like a pastiche of Yeats: the poems have little to offer save a clearly derivative music. Not only are they thinner and less interesting than Larkin's mature work; they are arguably less interesting than some of his earlier poems, written when he was still an undergraduate, where the dominant influence is Auden (Auden surfaces again as an influence in the middle stanzas of ‘The Building’, thirty years later). Some of these early sonnets (‘Conscript’, ‘A Writer’, ‘Observation’) could be taken for Auden, whereas such North Ship poems as ‘The moon is full tonight ’ or ‘To write one song, I said’ sound less like Yeats than like imitations of him: even the fact that they have no titles, when we realize how carefully chosen, and how important, the titles of Larkin's mature poems are, may be significant, suggesting that Larkin was quite right when he saw them as based on Yeat 's music rather than his ideas.

Leader, Zachary, ed. The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer. But there are times, too, when he grows weary of the masks he is forced to wear, and cannot restrain a genuine childlike sense of hope from coming forth in his work. Then we catch a glimpse of a different Larkin, as in Coming, which despite describing his childhood as a ‘forgotten boredom’, is filled with an immense sense of hope, even purity (the ‘fresh-peeled’ voice of the thrush), which seems to come directly from nature.The list of poems by Philip Larkin come mostly from the four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime: [1] [2] Bradford, Richard. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 2005. In this course, Professor Seamus Perry (University of Oxford) explores Philip Larkin's 1955 collection of poetry, The Less Deceived. After an introduction to the collection as a whole (including a discussion of the origins of the title 'The Less Deceived' itself), each module discusses two or three poems in the collection that are linked by a common theme. In the second module, for example, we think about the influence of Thomas Hardy on the collection, looking in particular at the poems 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album' and 'Next, Please'. Other themes discussed include: time, youth and memory (looking at the poems 'Skin', 'Triple Time' and 'Maiden Name'), negativity and nothingness ('I Remember, I Remember', 'Absences'), the ordinary and the commonplace ('Born Yesterday', 'Toads', 'Poetry of Departures'), escape, solitude, and oblivion ('Age', 'Wants', 'Coming'), the artist and aestheticism ('Reasons for Attendance'), religion and the church ('Church Going'), and animals ('Myxomatosis', 'Wires', 'At Grass'). In the tenth and final module, we think about the arrangement of the collection as a whole, which (as we shall see) was carefully considered by Larkin. Keith Sagar, ‘Church Going’ and ‘Wedding-Wind’, in Criticism in Action, ed. Maurice Hussey (London, 1969) p. 126.

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) also published other poems. They, along with the contents of the four published collections, are included in the 2003 edition of his Collected Poems in two appendices. The previous 1988 edition contains everything that appears in the 2003 edition and additionally includes all the known mature poems that he did not publish during his lifetime, plus an appendix of early work. To help differentiate between these published and unpublished poems in our table all poems that appear in the 2003 edition's appendices are listed as Collected Poems 2003; of course, they also appear in the 1988 volume.Larkin is often described as ‘anti-Modernist’, but some of his poems could also be called ‘anti-Romantic’, e.g. I Remember, I Remember, where he recalls the place he grew up in, where he ‘wasn’t spoken to by an old hat’; and yet there is no bitterness against the place where his childhood was ‘unspent’, for that bitterness would itself be a form of romanticism.