Less Deceived

Michael Wood considers Philip Larkin's comments on desire in his poem "Deceptions":

Larkin’s gloss on this poem—called “The Less Deceived” until he used the title for the volume the poem appeared in—is both lucid and moving. He said in a letter that he was not making “any claims to policy or belief,” but thought readers “might grasp my fundamentally passive attitude to poetry (and life too, I suppose) which believes that the agent is always more deceived than the patient.” The girl, he then implies, was not really less deceived but beyond illusion, because “there is positively no deception” about suffering. As Larkin says in the poem, this is not a consolation, but it is for him a melancholy truth about desire, which “comes from wanting something we haven’t got, which may not make us any happier when we have it.” What his poems suggest, as a kind of refinement of this idea, is that we scarcely know how to want anything without being afraid of our own wanting, and that we can nearly always make sure that what we get is not what we desired—not because we are unfortunate, but because we are devoted to our disappointing scenarios. Our “fundamentally passive attitude” conceals quite a bit of psychic scheming.

Not familiar with Larkin? You're in for a treat.

(Image: Larkin, pictured in 1966. Via the Telegraph.)