Authors: James Booth
66.
To Judy Egerton, 16 January 1971.
SL
,
p. 434.
67.
Larkin’s Latin is faulty. The quotation should be ‘quot homines tot disputandum est’. The usual, more economical form is ‘quot homines tot sententiae’, from Horace.
68.
SL
,
p. 436.
69.
Ibid.,
p. 477.
70.
‘Larkin’s Choice’,
Listener
, 29 March 1973, pp. 420–1.
71.
SL
,
p. 481.
72.
Motion, pp. 432–3.
19: Larkin’s Late Style (1969–72)
1.
SL
,
p. 420.
2.
30 October 1969.
Complete Poems
, p. 442.
3.
SL
,
p. 425.
4.
6 January 1970.
LM
, p. 405.
5.
Motion, p. 394.
6.
See James Booth, ‘Larkin as Animal Poet’,
AL
22 (October 2001), p. 6.
7.
To Thwaite, 25 April 1972.
SL
,
p. 457.
8.
Bowlby’s Row
, signed ‘E. Tarling 1978’, and
Entrance to Albert Dock
. Larkin Society, DX/329, inventory 6 and 12.
9.
LM
,
p. 348.
10.
Ibid.,
p. 381.
11.
Not in
LM
.
12.
The others are ‘Spring’ (ababcdcd effgeg), ‘Whatever Happened?’ (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ff) and ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’ (ababcdcde fgefg).
13.
Burnett (
Complete Poems
, p. 456) cites Roger Day, who indicates no rhyme in the last line.
14.
The fourth element, ‘earth’, has to be omitted for the sake of the metre.
15.
See V. Penelope Pelizzon, ‘Native Carnival: Philip Larkin’s Puppet-Theatre of Ritual’, in James Booth (ed.),
New Larkins for Old
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 213–23, at p. 218.
16.
See James Booth, ‘The Card-Players’, in Michael Hanke (ed.),
Fourteen English Sonnets: Critical Essays
, Studien zur anglistischen Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaft (28) (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2007), 169–77.
17.
I am grateful to Raphaël Ingelbien for his help with this poem.
18.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–69), David Teniers the Younger (1610–90), Adriaen Brouwer (c. 1605–38).
19.
Larkin wrote to Arthur J. Hobson on 15 December 1978: ‘I had no particular picture in mind. I should not go quite as far as to say that Brouwer was my favourite painter, but he is the only artist of whose work I have bothered to buy a book of reproductions, and in general I like Dutch low-life painting very much indeed.’ DPL/2/2/15/9.
20.
Adjustments were made before its publication in
Encounter
35.4 (October 1970), p. 41.
21.
Motion, p. 395.
22.
John Osborne, personal communication, 1996.
23.
John Mowat, ‘Larkin’ About in Hull’, in Cliff Forshaw (ed.),
Under Travelling Skies: Departures from Larkin
(Hull: Kingston Press, 2012), pp. 73–4.
24.
In
Collected Poems
(1988) the final date of drafting of ‘Vers de Société’ is given as ‘19.5.71’. This is the date at the top left of the page. But Larkin has written ‘20/5/71’ at the end of the draft. DPL/1/7/41, p. 159.
25.
In
New Humanist
, 86.8 (August 1971), p. 253.
26.
SL
, p. 437.
27.
Complete Poems
,
p.
463. Motion writes (p. 373) that Larkin began the poem on ‘the same evening that he wrote Annus Mirabilis’ (16 June 1967). But there is no sign of this in the workbook. DPL/1/7/21. (Burnett p. 38) prints the poem without indents.
28.
DPL/1/7/42.
29.
1 August 1971.
LM
,
p. 423.
30.
26 June 1971.
SL
,
p. 440.
31.
This was a short-term arrangement, while Philip and Kitty were both on holiday, not as Motion implies, a semi-permanent move (p. 414).
32.
See Marion Lomax, ‘Larkin with Women’, in Michael Baron (ed.),
Larkin with Poetry: English Association Conference Papers
(Leicester: English Association, 1997), pp. 39–40.
33.
Introduction to
Adventures with the Irish Brigade
,
FR
, p. 119.
34.
To Colin Gunner, 26 October 1971.
SL
,
p. 449.
35.
SL
,
p. 487.
36.
Ibid., p. 450.
37.
14 November, 1971.
38.
SL
,
p. 453.
39.
13 July 1959.
SL
,
p. 305.
40.
Burnett (
Complete Poems
, p. 448) points out Motion’s mistake in connecting this incident with the first line of ‘Livings I’ rather than ‘Livings III’. Motion, p. 415.
41.
31 May 1972.
SL
, p. 459.
42.
SL
,
p. 452.
43.
Letter to Robert Jackson. DPL/2/2/10. Motion, p. 418.
20: Winter Coming (1972–4)
1.
Motion, p. 419.
2.
DPL/1/8/2.
3.
Compare ‘his hand, holding her hand’ in ‘An Arundel Tomb’.
4.
Burnett (
Complete Poems
, p. 458), citing R. J. C. Watt, misidentifies the hospital as Kingston General, a Victorian building, now demolished, which bore no resemblance to a clean-sliced cliff.
5.
The singular noun ‘human’ never occurs in Larkin’s poetry. The plural occurs again only in the light verse ‘Dear CHARLES, My Muse, asleep or dead’. ‘Human’ occurs as an adjective only in the juvenile ‘After Dinner Remarks’, and then, substantively, in ‘Sympathy in White Major’. ‘Humanity’ occurs only once, in relation to the Polish airgirl in ‘Like the train’s beat’. R. J. C. Watt (ed.),
A Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin
(Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1995), pp. 223–4.