Private lives and Philip Larkin

Francis-Noël Thomas, in Humanities magazine:

His inclinations were, in almost equal measure, to be confiding and to be deceptive. During his lifetime, he misrepresented his whole career as a poet in the same way he misrepresented the writing of “The Whitsun Weddings.” After his death, he was shown to be—perhaps by his own design—something quite different from the provincial librarian who, after work, wrote several of the best English-language poems of the second half of the twentieth century. The appearance of the poems he held back from publication revealed someone far more credible: a working poet whose impressive successes were sometimes hard won and whose commitment to writing was unremitting and lay at the core of his identity. When he found he could no longer write poems, he was devastated.

Clive James claimed that people who attain the measure of fame that Larkin achieved (or suffered) have no private lives. Nevertheless, Larkin’s oral request that the approximately thirty volumes of his diaries be destroyed was honored. A large volume of his letters, however, was published in 1992 and set off a cascade of negative comment from shocked readers that, for a few years, threatened to diminish his standing—at least in some academic circles—as a poet.

That tempest seems to be over; the culture police have not managed to bury his achievements as a poet under his politically incorrect views, his apparent misogyny, or his duplicity toward his lovers. Now, some twenty-six years after his death, his complete poems have been published in an exemplary scholarly edition by Archie Burnett, a director of the Editorial Institute and professor of English at Boston University.

See a previous post on Larkin here, and a sample of his work here.