/lit/ - Literature

>>11844886
he fucked me up
he didn't mean to, but he did

>>11844886
If he were alive today, he'd 100% be posting here.

woah.. so this is the power... of anglo poetry

>>11844957
>basing your entire opinion of a poet on his one meme poem

>>11844886
just fucked my shit up senpai

>>11844966
>thinking anyone who has written such subpar verse could ever make any meaningful contributions to the art

>>11844973
Nothing wrong with the verse. Write an appraisal of it right now, detailing your thoughts.

>>11844989
okay but just for (you)

the theme is as banal as it is puerile. imagery is entirely absent. nothing aesthetic is accomplished. musically it offers nothing sweet or of lasting interest. it uses series of rhymes that belong in a 5th grader's creative writing exercise. so, on all conceivable levels, it is shit.

>>11845003
>the theme is as banal as it is puerile.
the theme of the never-ending generational cycle of misery which has been examined by the likes of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Mann, Waugh, Pinter, Bronte is banal and puerile apparently. How come? Because you feel like it should be? What does that matter.

>imagery is entirely absent
"it deepens like a coastal shelf"

>nothing aesthetic is accomplished.
vague and empty statement

>it uses series of rhymes that belong in a 5th grader's creative writing exercise.
The simplicity of the rhyming scheme (and of the poem as a whole) is quite obviously deliberate and it's childlike jauntiness is juxtaposed quite severely (and humorously) with the black nihilism at the heart of the poem.

> musically it offers nothing sweet or of lasting interest.
Clearly it is of lasting interest since it's probably one of the most famous poems in English of the last 100 years. Takes a certain kind of musicality to get stuck in people's heads for this long. The tetrameter is really crucial here.

>>11845112
nice anon you straight dabbed on that motherfucker

>>11844957
yikes

>>11844973
You're really dumb if you think that's a bad poem.

>>11845112
Well done, you yeeted that cretin into a hole.

>>11845112
Based and brutal

>>11844957
based and blackpilled

>>11845003
Just to add to the above crit, the music comes through most strongly in the second stanza. The harshness of 'fuck' works there because there's a lot of power added through the hard clicking sounds of lines like "fools in old-style hats and coats/Who half the time were soppy-stern" - track especially the consonance of the t sounds. This is what distinguishes a good poet from average edgy verse. I do think it's one of Larkin's throwaway weaker poems though, compared to stuff like High Windows:


When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

It touches on the same theme but in a more complex manner and ends on a transcendent image. Larkin would have done a lot better if he had shaved down his oeuvre as a whole.

>>11844886

Going, Going is a work of art

Larkin was a little unusual - he was quite conservative and generally snobbish, but also very much wanted to be a popular poet. The kind ‘people would read in pubs’. This Be the Verse isn’t my favourite of his but it’s striking to the casual reader and extremely easy to learn by heart, so it’s a good poem without necessarily exceptional aesthetic qualities.

>>11845616
>he was quite conservative and generally snobbish, but also very much wanted to be a popular poet.
Probably the most /ourguy/ poet in history

>>11844957
definitely gonna read this at my Dad's eulogy

I'm from his area and though a younger man, have corresponded with various people who have met him and have corresponded with him.
In fact my grandfather was all but one living next door to him at once.
He epitomizes the conflicted and resigned English intellectual. A perverted populist on one hand and a repressed gentleman on the other. He was one of the first to admit publicly how the sexual revolution ruined England, how desire without consolidation entered a new age of romantic purgatory.
He's praised in Hull, but if he were alive (or if any likeminded person) to espouse his views he'd be cast out to sea faster than you could blink. It's a certain hypocrisy within this country that has yet to be resolved, how the "old souls" who want to live in the present, will claim their place.

I find it hard to believe that with how the general public has manifested presently with technology that a mass of folk in the UK haven't become casually sexist and classist by default of the superficiality left by that sexual revolution. Larkin was in the end, a middle class man talking about a predominantly working class country (as the north holds less wealth).

>>11844957
Are you sure that wasn't written by DEY WUZ KANGS N SHIET?

AY HOL DUP
DIS BE DA VERSE MA NIGGA
DIS GON BE IT HOMEBOY
SHIIEEEEEEETTT

>>11846082
Based

>>11846082
Kek

ain't no tranny so he can stay

>>11844903
Underrated post.

>>11846082
>>11846322
>>11846438
>>11848598
god, why are newfaggots such low effort posters? btw, underrated means a good yet unreplied post that has been buried, you swine

>>11848611
Bitch, I've been here since long before there was even /lit/.
Your reddit is showing in your bants.

>>11848978
>Bitch,

>>11845451
Yeah, that poem is much better, great in fact. I appreciate Larkin at his best like in these poems but don’t think “This Be The Verse” has to be defended that staunchly. I love the poem you just posted but also agree with >>11845003 that TBTV is kind of trite and not that beautifully written. You need to get out of the mindset of “this artist created some great stuff therefore even their mediocre stuff is GREAT and I need to defend it against detractors.”

>>11849224
It's like why publish the throwaway stuff when you could just focus on poems like Church Going? But I guess poets need to eat as well:

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

>>11845112
based

An Arundrel Tomb is fantastic:

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

I KILLED A HEDGEHOG WITH MY LAWNMOWER WE SHOULD BE KINDER LMAO

>>11844886
Is he the mad scientist who accidentally drank chemical X and mutated into Mitch McConnell?

>>11851036
I don't know for sure but my instincts say that yes, he is

>>11844973
>>11845003
English majors should be strangled with their own entrails. I bet you scrawl notes in the margins of books, don't you? And underline words completely at random. You are the ordure of humanity.

>>11845487
Based.

Also The Whitsun Weddings is an utter fucking masterpiece. Not even meming.