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.