Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 by Philip Larkin

Author:Philip Larkin [Larkin, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571294978
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-12-20T06:00:00+00:00

my Muse

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Will rise like that great wave that leaps and hangs

The seaweed on a vessel’s mast-top high.

That precisely describes his knack of suddenly unearthing, as it were, some hitherto unnoticed detail or irony or pleasure and extending it for our enjoyment on the end of a far-fetched metaphor or simile. The wind dragging the corn by her long hair into the dark wood, the sheep that walk up the hill and become clouds, the wet tombstones breathing in the sun, the summer spreading a green tent on the bare pole of a tree: Davies never lost the power to refresh the commonest experience. Perhaps what one cherishes most, however, is not this never-sleeping fancy (which is after all never far from whimsy), but the honest simplicity of spirit—the decency—that informs all he wrote: his tenderness for the animal world, his continual wonder and delight in natural surroundings, his love for women and children and the poor. That this in its turn could become perilously close to kindergarten banality Davies was very well aware. His response was characteristic: he could never be as bad as Masefield. (In fact Mr Stonesifer might well have had a fifth chapter, ‘Davies the Ironist’, for the poet could be lethally deflating under his simple exterior if he thought the occasion demanded it.) But when it was supported by sharpness of language and keenness of observation it comes out on the other side of banality, as it were, and constitutes Davies’s unique contribution to literature—a steady, unecstatic celebration of natural beauty and the qualities in man that seem most allied to it.

The best that can be said of the new edition of his poems2 is that it is clearly printed and at 616 pages for 25s good value for money. It has an introduction by Sir Osbert Sitwell, and a Foreword by Daniel George, but neither undertakes the elementary editorial responsibility of saying which poems came from which books and whether they are the text as it was first printed. Mr George proudly announces that he has persuaded the publishers to include 113 poems that Davies, in some unspecified circumstances, had suppressed, but does not say which they are. There is no bibliography. All in all, a disappointing piece of work.

1963

1 Richard Stonesifer, W. H. Davies: A Critical Biography (London: Cape, 1963).

2 The Complete Poems of W. H. Davies (London: Cape, 1963).

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