Fumbling with the raw materials

Most great artists begin as mimics. They do not, as Clara Schumann claimed Brahms did, come into the world ‘ready-made’. Manet prided himself on painting ‘straight from nature’, but he had spent many hours copying Old Masters in the Louvre, and his friend Degas thought they were guiding his brush as surely as they were guiding his own. Van Gogh copied engravings in the Illustrated London News. Oscar Wilde gave himself a crash course of Restoration comedies before writing plays himself.

We cannot expect too much of Philip Larkin’s apprentice pieces, collected in this book (which of us would like his contributions to the school magazine disinterred?); but they show who influenced him when he was young and how, when and where the authentic Larkin voice of lyrical moroseness made its debut in his work. Even before opening the book, one could have hazarded an on-target guess as to who his main influences might be. The poems date from the late 1930s to the late 1940s. So Gerard Manley Hopkins would be likely to figure: he was chosen to be the first poet in Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse (1931); F. R. Leavis gave further momentum to the Jesuit’s reputation in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932); and W. H. Gardner’s scholarly two-volume book on the poet came out in 1944, the centenary of Hopkins’s birth.

From 1937 Dylan Thomas was reading his own poems on the radio in that glorious, resonant voice which not even Richard Burton could rival. And spoors of Marvell, Gray, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Whitman, Housman, Sassoon, Yeats, Betjeman and even Osbert Sitwell are detectable. The influence of Eliot and Auden in this period goes without saying, though later on Larkin sloughed off the extremer forms of modernism like deadly snakes’ skins; and in All What Jazz? he blamed Picasso for ruining modern art, Eliot for ruining modern poetry and Charlie Parker for ruining jazz.