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.
Imitating Hopkins carries an insuperable danger: he is so original and idiosyncratic, the debt is always as obvious as the stain on the hands of a thief who has stolen coins smeared with dye. The Hopkinsian outcroppings in these early Larkin poems read like pastiches or straight cribs. The ‘leaping new sun’ in Larkin’s ‘The Ships at Mylae’ is perhaps a deliberate allusion to Hopkins’s Binsey poplars which ‘Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun’. By the way the word ‘sun’ appears in the Larkin poems often enough to satisfy an Aztec worshipper: also, the often accompanying ‘shade’, in which Larkin glumly places himself. Altogether I count 112 mentions of the sun. In the poem ‘Butterflies’ there are three suns in as many lines, and the opening could be taken for a mischievous parody of ‘Binsey Madly Popkins’ (as an unsmitten friend of mine calls him):
When Larkin ends his ‘Why did I dream of you last night?’Side-stepping, fluttering, quick-flecking, dropping like tops under the blue sky…
we catch an echo of this, from one of Hopkins’s… Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago
‘terrible sonnets’ —
(An early commentator interpreted that ‘him’ as an unreceptive God; later biographers think it a reference to Hopkins’s unrequited, unrequitable love for the poet Digby Mackworth Dolben.)… cries like dead letters sentTo dearest him that lives alas! Away.
One trick Larkin picks up from Hopkins is the one Hopkins learned from Welsh poetry — the ‘consonant chime’ the Welsh call cynghanedd. Examples in Hopkins’s poems are (in ‘The Woodlark’):
and (in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’) ‘Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey’. (A parodist of Hopkins, in a spoof poem about his clearing snow from urinals — a chore the poet was once given — wrote ‘sledge-sludge, dredge-drudge’.) In Lar- kin’s verse-drama Behind the FaCrush-silk poppies aflash… blood-gush, blade-gash
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