The Importance of Philip Larkin
I sit down to write this essay primarily for American readers, .it seems to me a convenient moment to put on record a certain pessimism about Philip Larkin's transatlantic reception. I don't think, to put the matter baldly, that he will ever be such a favorite with American readers of poetry as he is with English. There are two reasons for this, one deep seated, one trivial. To get the trivial one out of the way first, Larkin is so rooted in English life, his references are so solidly linked to English places and customs and institutions and I didn't even say British, I said English that the American reader can easily drop into one of several pitfalls: misinterpretation plain and simple; or feeling the detail as more exotic than it actually is; or knowingness, if he happens to be well versed in English life and has seen, for instance, the cycle crates on Coventry station or the trolleybuses carrying people down "the long straight miles" into Hull. All that can be guarded against. The deepseated reason, however, is more difficult to counter, and I am not sure that American readers will want to counter it or even whether they should. Larkin's poetry aims at a precision, a fine adjustment, of language, an accuracy, a way of getting the words to contain exactly the meaning he wants them to contain and not a scrap more or less, which has not on the whole, in this century, been one of the ideals that American poets have set themselves. The two literatures have of course long since moved apart. The nineteenth century convention that English and American poets were interestingly different but clearly related "cousins" the assumption that poetry in English was a huge rich cake out of which one could cut individual slices called "an American poem," "an English poem" is now held by no one; indeed, it is scarcely remembered by anyone under about fifty. The last considerable American poet to have vital links with English poetry was Robert Frost, whose first public recognition came in England, and who repaid England handsomely by instigating the poetry