Larkin and Gunn, Self and Others

Larkin25 is currently marking that anniversary of the poet's death in Hull and good wishes to all those near enough to go and enjoy it. I'm afraid it's a long way from here by my Larkinesque standards. I'd like to go to Hull but I'd like to be able to come home the same day. So, by no means in any way an official Larkin25 event, I'd like to do my bit from here, and so present my piece, limited by what a blogspot like this can sensibly take,

Larkin and Gunn, Self and Others

Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn were grouped broadly together as young poets in the 1950’s, perhaps for reasons of convenience or publicity, but have long since been recognized as having diverted from that similarity or perhaps having had precious little in common in the first place, and being very different personalities.
Certainly, their recorded opinions of each other wouldn’t suggest that they would have wanted to be thought similar. Although in one letter Larkin comments that Gunn looks ‘handsome’ in comparison with himself, he soon afterwards comments ‘What a genius that man has for making an ass of himself’. Gunn is more charitable in the opposite direction when he says that Larkin is a poet of ‘minute ambitions’ who carried them out ‘exquisitely’, which I think is something of a compliment although intended as a back-handed one.
Larkin’s reputation is still for many that of a misanthrope whereas Gunn’s is, amongst other things, as a hedonist but they might have a little more in common than it first appears beyond the apparent coincidence that they are my two favourite poets not only of their period but of any period and one of the ways that they might be compared rather than contrasted goes some way to putting back together that original shackling that they underwent, whether under protest or not, as members of the putative ‘Movement’.
The joint Selected Poems published by Faber that featured Gunn and Ted Hughes was originally conceived as featuring Larkin, too, but whereas that book perhaps helped to associate Gunn with Hughes on account of a perceived shared interest in violence, Gunn is nothing like Hughes as a poet in any useful sense and his kinship with Larkin, although not complete, has more substance.
Yeats and Auden were inevitable models for them both as young poets, acknowledged in inter-textual references as well as conscious imitation in early poems, such as Gunn’s Unsettled Motorcyclist and Larkin’s Ultimatum as well as Gunn’s use of personae and Larkin’s Yeatsian idiom in XX Poems. But Gunn and Larkin’s poems, like On the Move and Church Going, are similarly made things, using big Yeatsian stanzas with complex rhyme schemes, that also move from observed specific detail to broader, philosophical conclusions. That isn’t to say that these are the only such poems or poets that ever did such a thing but it is to say that these two poets could work with similar methods.
What the poets of the 50’s were said to be doing was reacting against the trends of the generations that came before them, most obviously the wordy, rhetorical style of Dylan Thomas, with a more empirical, ironic attitude. Gunn didn’t remember it quite like that, though, whatever it looked like to commentators. He said, ‘we were disregarding the leading figures. It is not opposing, it is just not taking any notice and that is what Larkin and I had in common…’ . So, it might have been no more than the avoidance of what they independently saw as excess and bad practice, but it did lead to genuine consensus of method even if that method was to be put to different uses.
Larkin’s misanthropy was perhaps something that he worked on and developed as a kind of defence. As a naturally shy man, he adopted an awkward and sometimes uninviting manner whereas Gunn, a much more adventurous individual, saw the world in his early poems as divided between ‘self’ and others, with a lone protagonist condemned to separation from his fellows. Comparing the poems of The Less Deceived (1955) with those of The Sense of Movement (1957), one might think of Larkin as the poet kneeling ‘by all-generous waters’ whereas Gunn is ‘born to fog, to waste,…/An individual’.
Gunn goes through immense stylistic and thematic shifts, in Touch and Misanthropos, reaching out to ‘break down that chill’ and eventually finds himself merging with natural elements in geysers and under the influence of LSD whereas Larkin’s poems adopt the trademark curmudgeonly attitude in This Be The Verse or Posterity under the influence of gin and tonic.
But Larkin’s misanthropy always had a cartoon aspect to it. One knew that a proper reading of the whole poem and other poems uncovered a rather more generous and celebratory spirit than he sometimes pretended to. Not only are there poems like The Trees, but the heavily qualified ending of An Arundel Tomb and even the return to life at the end of the morbid and terrifying Aubade show for certain that there was a light in Larkin’s gloomy universe. This Be The Verse is ironic and few would read it as a literal piece of advice.
Moving in the opposite direction, celebrating nature, cheap thrills, promiscuity and adventure, Gunn’s heroic quest for fulfilment in his later work is ultimately a way of escaping the anxieties he came from, of Sartrean nothingness and solipsism, and from those he encounters later, like the AIDS virus in 1980’s San Francisco. In The Man with Night Sweats he is inadequately human in his realization,

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.

It is almost as if they changed places and came to see the world in some small ways from the point of view that had been the other’s. And at some point, they must have passed each other going in opposite directions. Where Larkin writes in High Windows of

The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Gunn had written in Lights Among Redwood,

At once
tone is forgotten: we stand
and stare – mindless, diminished-
at their rosy immanence.

So, perhaps not so different after all, the awkward librarian and the West Coast hipster, the arch Conservative and the cool Liberal, the so-called little Englander and the trans-Atlantic stylist. They were both rigorous critics within their different areas and their poems benefitted from a clarity of diction that their early methods continued to provide them with as well as a wide range of reading from other centuries as well as other languages. There is no photograph of them together because they never met (please correct me if this is wrong) but I’d like to think that if they had tried hard enough they might have found they had more in common than they thought.