Wisdom Of The Week

Larkin’s poetry, in particular, encourages us to take a more capacious view of the matter. This isn’t because his poetry is didactic in some straightforwardly moralistic way; indeed nothing could be more alien to Larkin than the vulgar notion that poetry is meant to make you a nicer person. Rather his poems, if we let them, awaken us to a certain sensibility that is not exhausted by an appreciation of their expressive originality and sublimity. In short, there’s an undeniable sense in which Larkin’s poems have the effect of making us a little deeper, perhaps even wiser too.

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My own take is from the perspective of someone who wishes to know if it’s possible to derive any insights of general human significance from Larkin’s poetry. But first a very brief word about my un-Larkinesque-sounding “insights of general human significance”.

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So what might these insights be? They are, I suggest, the lessons that can be wrought from the kind of uncompromisingly undeluded but humane poetic sensibility of Larkin. The qualities that we might associate with what we might call Larkin’s realism would include a sense of scepticism, honesty, humour, ambivalence and even courage. If we were to use Larkin’s more favoured and evocative compound adjectives we might describe it as undogmatic, undeceived, unbelieving, unconsoling, un-Orphic and undaunted. As for the actual perspective on or view of life itself, Larkin’s poem Ignorance gives us part of the answer:

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure,

Of what is true or right or real,

But forced to qualify or so I feel,

Or Well, it does seem so,

Someone must know.

With his typically light but unfailingly assured touch, Larkin conveys the inescapable subjectivity of modern life. No longer can we claim that any of our views about things of importance are grounded upon objective and unchanging foundations. The loss of the old, pre-modern reassuring certainties means that we have no choice but to rest our convictions on nothing more than our own personal and contingently-formed outlook. And yet part of us still can’t help yearning for the possibility that somewhere “someone must know” what’s really “true or right or real”. The disappearance of truth, or rather the acknowledgment of its absence, shouldn’t entail a strenuously ironic embrace of the arbitrary and meaningless.

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Never to lose sight of the preciousness of non-human life and what it can tell us about ourselves:

The little lives of earth and form,

Of finding food, and keeping warm,

Are not like ours, and yet

A kinship lingers nonetheless;

We hanker for the homeliness

Of den, and hole, and set.

   “The Little Lives of Earth and Form”

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But why should we think this is good for us? Well, one of the main benefits of reading Larkin is that it helps change our conception of what good means or at least might mean. He achieves this by broadening or, better still, deepening our understanding of the good. After reading Larkin, it becomes peculiarly difficult to retain our preconceived, unsceptical notion that the good is necessarily optimistic or inspirational, let alone pious or cosily moralistic. Rather it becomes far more natural and necessary to see the world as a largely cold and comfortless place where only the most exiguous and ephemeral forms of meaning and pleasure are derivable.

The eminent critic Christopher Ricks was definitely on to something when he compared Larkin’s unsanguine view of the world with that of Dr Johnson:

“Human life”, Johnson said, “is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” Life is not something that can be made better other than palliatively (not that this is nothing), and life cannot be bested. Or worsted. Except by death. “Experience makes literature look insignificant beside life, as indeed life does beside death,” Larkin wrote.

There is much to learn from Ricks’s observation. His remark that life can be treated only palliatively strikes just the right chord with Larkin’s equivocal view of the world. Larkin is realistic and honest enough to declare the relative paltriness of poetry compared with the solidity of life, and then the relative paltriness of life compared with the certainty and finality of death. But we shouldn’t forget the inclusion of the not insignificant caveat “look” in the above quote from Larkin: literature is not rendered worthless by life or death. On the contrary, it’s one of the few palliatives that genuinely helps.

- Is Larkin good for you? by Johnny Lyons