Larkin and Herbert, via Thwaite

An essay somebody else might have to write could outline the compare and contrast between Philip Larkin and George Herbert. There's mileage in almost any comparative project if there's a point to be made but by the time I've finished my Gioia-Larkin effort I might have used up all available lines on Larkin. For me, they were brought together by Anthony Thwaite, regaling anybody within earshot at the bar at the first Larkin Society conference in 1997, with his view that they were both 'great, minor poets'.

Given the amount of work Thwaite put into editing Larkin, he could be credited with proving himself wrong and helping to reverse the process described by Cole Porter in turning him 'from minor to major'. 

 

One's own firmly held views become sacrosanct and we defend them for as long as we can and even well beyond any such point. A major recurrent theme here over the years has been an unhealthy need in me to establish that An Arundel Tomb in Larkin does not say that 'what will survive of us is love'. That last line is thoroughly undermined and hollowed out by the lines that lead us up to it. The reason why it is one of the greatest poems in the language of the C20th is how it hangs out such a resonant line on such fragile foundations.

And yet, still waiting for more books to arrive to proceed with Gioia Studies, I spent some time outside with Letters to Monica and could see the poem taking shape.

There is a possibility that when the line first occurred to him he might have thought he meant it. But before he finished it, he made it considerably less clear. And, at the time, still didn't like the poem much. He had also had serious doubts about Church Going. We should all be so lucky to be able to doubt such poems but his 'quality control' perhaps depended on doubting everything and one's shelves would be less laden if other poets had been quite so scrupulous and not troubled us with quite so many poems. 

That poem got through by the skin of its teeth, being sufficiently amended to eventually say what I'm still fairly confident it says and then squeezing into the book. One wonders how many other masterpieces were lost when their authors took against them and made the safety-first decision of not including them. Maybe not many because most writers weren't quite so fastidious and were glad enough to have something to fill a page but it makes one wonder when, later, Larkin said he had all the 'fillers' for his next book but not the good ones, quite where his cut-off point was.

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George Herbert is allotted a label here after all these years. He's never been anywhere near a favourite, probably because his faith and religion are as intrinsic to everything he ever wrote as Larkin's downbeat ordinariness were to him.

But the end of summer is almost touchable. While it's not an attractive proposition to go on excursions in such heat as might not once have been prohibitive but now seems so, September needs to be made use of because it can be perfect. 

Bemerton has by now been swallowed up by Salisbury but in the C17th was outside of it. It makes for a gorgeous tableau, the rural rectory and mundane church with a vicar poet who would still be read 400 years later. John Drury's Music at Midnight was one of those sumptuous hardbacks that are good to have even if one isn't a believer in its subject but I remain open to being convinced. He analyses some poems to show there might be more to them than blinding devotion and doctrinaire Christianity and his work lasted so well that Let All the World in Every Corner Sing lent itself to being the theme tune to Songs of Praise.

I'll go and have a look with my senior railcard, willingness to walk and need to think I've been somewhere and done something and not just read it in a book.