3.09.2006
Poets’ journal
[Posted 3:52 PM by David Yezzi]
Anyone familiar with Philip Larkin’s work will be aware of his acid wit in poems such as “This Be the Verse”. In 1978, Larkin was asked by Charles Monteith to compose a poem for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and Larkin responded with this quatrain:
In times when nothing stood
but worsened, or grew strange,
there was one constant good:
she did not change.
Larkin bristled at what he called “this lapidary lark,” though it is a perfectly respectable instance of occasional verse. According to Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion, when Larkin sent the poem to Monteith, he also included these lines for ER II purportedly by one Ted Hughes:
The sky split apart in malice,
The stars rattled like pans on a shelf,
Crow shat on Buckingham Palace,
God pissed himself.
When Larkin declined the laureateship in 1984, his sole regret was that he had opened the door for Hughes. Larkin had never liked Hughes much. He found his poems, especially when read aloud, “appallingly bad.” Larkin once described the two of them at a reading in Hull: “I was in the chair, providing a sophisticated, insincere, effete, and gold-watch-chained alternative to his primitive, forthright, virile, leather-jacketed persona.” As Motion tells it, “When Larkin later discovered the university photographer had snapped them together on the podium, looking as different as he described, he ordered a copy of the picture, framed it, and hung it in his lavatory.” Ouch. Acid wit, indeed.