Whatever we may feel about the man, some things are eternal, and in his work he found the words for them
When, 50 years ago, the Department of the Environment commissioned a poem from Philip Larkin, he produced, as a reader recently pointed out to the Guardian, Going, Going, about felled trees, bleak high-rises, spreading shopping centres and parking lots. It is about the erosion, too, of his previous trust that “earth will always respond / However we mess it about”. If he had lived until this year, when he would have turned 100, he would, one suspects, have been disappointed but not at all surprised that we are still chucking filth in the sea. The poem ends the way many Larkin poems do, with a deceptively conversational profundity: “Most things are never meant.” Which doesn’t change the damage done.
Despite a difficult period in the 1990s – after publication of Andrew Motion’s biography and an edition of his letters that revealed his racism and misogyny, not to mention infidelity, porn use and general puerility – Larkin has never gone away, and the poetry is why. Even the most unpoetic recognise the demotic bluntness of “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” Or, “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me) – / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” In recent weeks Keir Starmer in parliament and thousands on Twitter have quoted his lines on Elizabeth II, written for her silver jubilee in 1977: “In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange, / there was one constant good: / she did not change.”
