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Homage to Philip Larkin
ByJohn Banville
Collected Poems (2003)
 by Philip Larkin, edited and with an introduction by Anthony ThwaiteFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 218 pp., $14.00 (paper)
 First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin
 by Richard BradfordPeter Owen/Dufour Editions, 272 pp., $49.95
Collected Poems (1988)
 by Philip Larkin, edited and with an introduction by Anthony ThwaiteFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 330 pp. (out of print)
 Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life
 by Andrew MotionLondon: Faber and Faber, 570 pp., £14.99 (paper)
 Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–1982
 by Philip LarkinLondon: Faber and Faber, 315 pp., £10.00 (paper)
Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985
edited by Anthony ThwaiteLondon: Faber and Faber, 791 pp., £9.99 (paper)
1.
T.S. Eliot observed toward the end of his life that he could not be called a great poet because he had not written an epic. This was a sly piece of false modesty on the part of Old Possum, implying as it did that had he turned his pen to the epic form he would of course have been up there with Homer, Virgil, and Dante. His stricture also served, backhandedly, to withhold greatness from other poets of what he thought of as hisculturally debased time, such as Yeats and Wallace Stevens. In the Age of Prose, Eliotwas saying, even the finest poet can be expected to manage no more than the smallthing. To all this Philip Larkin would likely have answered with his accustomedepistolary expletive: bum.
[1]
 T.S. Eliot observó hacia eñ fin de su vida que él no podría ser llamado un gran poeta, yaque no había escrito una épica. Esta fue una astuta pieza de falsa modestia de parte deOld Possum, insinuando que debería volver su lapiz hacia la forma épica que lo situaría junto con Homero, Virgilio y Dante. Su crítica sirvió también, (…), para retener lagrandeza de otros poetas de los que él pensó como su culturalmente degradada época,como Yeats y Wallace Stevens. En la Era de la Prosa, Eliot decía, que incluso el poetamás fino sólo puede esperar tratar no más que una pequeña cosa. Para todo esto PhilipLarkin gustaría responder con su acostumbrado improperio epistolar: culo.
 
Larkin had the reputation of being the most costive of artists. In his writing lifetime— from the late 1930s until the middle of the 1970s, when the muse left him, returningonly for brief and infrequent trysts—he published five short volumes of verse, with longintervals of silence between each appearance. Of these volumes he considered
The Less Deceived 
(1955),
The Whitsun Weddings
(1964), and
 High Windows
(1974) to containthe totality of his mature work. In those three and a half decades, however, he also produced two novels,
 Jill 
and
 A Girl in Winter 
, as well as a large body of essays,reviews, and occasional pieces which were collected as
 All What Jazz 
(1970),
 Required Writing 
(1983), and the posthumous
 Further Requirements
(2001).Larkin tuvo la reputación de ser el más indolente de los artistas. En su periodo deescritura –desde fines de los 30 hasta mediados de los 70, cuando la musa finalmente lodejó, retornando sólo por breves e infrecuentes coqueteos – publicó cinco cortosvolúmenes de verso, con largos intervalos de silencio entre cada aparición. De esosvolúmenes él concideró que The Less Deceived (1955), Whitesum Weddings (1964), yHigh Windows contenían la totalidad de su trabajo maduro. En esas tres y mediadecadas, de todas formas, el también produjo dos novelas, Hill y A girl in Winter, a lavez que un largo cuerpo de ensayos, críticas, y piezas ocacionales recojidas en All WhatJazz (1970), Required Writing (1983) y el postumo Further Requirements (2001).He also edited
The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse
(1973), which helabored on happily for some seven years—he really did love libraries, and was probablymost at ease within their tranquil confines —which was a great success with the reading public, and which brought its editor considerable royalties. Then, in 1988, three yearsafter the poet's death, his friend and literary coexecutor, Anthony Thwaite, brought outthe
Collected Poems
. Although Thwaite was widely criticized for printing the poems inchronological order, which some regarded as no order at all, the volume was arevelation. Who would have thought the man had so much poetry in him?También editó The Oxford Book of Twentieh-Century English Verse (1973), al que sededicó felizmente por unos siete años – él realmente amaba las bibliotecas, y fue probablemente más facil esa labor dentro de sus tranquilos confines- el cual tuvo ungran éxito entre público lector, y que le trajo a su editor considerables dividendos. En1988, tres años después de la muerte del poeta, su amigo y co-albacea, AnthonyThwaite, lanzó los Collected Poems. Sin embargo, a pesar de que Thwaite fueextremadamente criticado por imprimir los poemas en orden cronológico, aunque unoslo consideraron sin orden alguno, el volumen fue una revelación. ¿Quién habría pensadoque el hombre tenía tanta poesía en sí?And it was not merely that Thwaite had uncovered a cache of inspired juvenilia,although there was a lot of that—the editor put a "substantial selection" of this work,including the contents of Larkin's first published collection,
The North Ship
, in aseparate section, "Early Poems 1938–45," at the back of the volume
[2]
—but that therewere so many poems Larkin had left unpublished—sixty-one in the section of mature poems and twenty-two in that of early work. From this material Larkin might haveassembled a further, fat, volume, one which a poet who was less a perfectionist than he
 
would have been proud of. Indeed, in the case of a handful of these poems it is hard toknow the reason for their suppression; the fact that they were withheld is in itself anindication of Larkin's confidence and scrupulousness as a poet.
[3]
 Y no fue simplemente que Thwaite haya revelado una grupo de poemas de su época juvenil, aunque gran parte de estos –que el editor puso en una “selección substancial” desu trabajo, incluyendo contenido de la primera publicación de Larkin, The North Ship,en una sección separada, “Early Poems 1938-45”, en la parte trasera del volumen- sinoque muchos de estos fueron los poemas que Larkin dejó inéditos –sesenta y uno en lasección de poemas de madures y veintidós en la de su obra temprana. De su material sedebió haber recogido algo completamente distinto de aquel gordo volumen, del cual un poeta que fue tan breve y perfeccionista haya podido sentirse orgulloso. De todasformas, en el caso de un puñado de estos poemas es difícil saber la razón de susupresión; el hecho de que ellos fueron ocultados es en sí mismo una indicación de laconfidencia y los escrúpulos de Larkin como poeta.Thwaite must have anticipated criticism of the
Collected Poems
of 1988, for in hisintroduction to that volume he writes:Thwaite debió haberse anticipado a la crítica de los Collected Poems de 1988, por laintroducción que el escribió al volumen:To have added so many unpublished poems, from the flood at the beginning to thetrickle towards the end, together with many others which he published in his lifetime but chose not to collect, is something I do not take lightly. Philip Larkin's own precisewishes in his will, drawn up during his illness in July 1985 [he was to die at the beginning of December that year], were not at first entirely clear; yet he certainly gavehis literary executors, of whom I am one, discretion over the publication of hisunpublished manuscripts.Agregar muchos poemas inéditos, desde el diluvio de sus comienzos hasta la gotera desu final, junto con muchos otros que publicó en su vida pero que eligió no incluirlos enuna obra, es algo que no tomo a la lijera. Los deseos precisos de Philip Larkin en sutestamento, redactado durante su enfermedad en julio de 1985 [él llegó a morir haciacomienzos de diciembre de ese año], no fueron enteramente claros; ciertamente el dio asus albaceas literarios, de los cuales yo soy uno, discreción sobre la publicación de susmanuscritos ineditos.Before he died Larkin had instructed his lover Monica Jones that his diaries should bedestroyed. Monica called on another of Larkin's lovers, his former secretary BettyMackereth, to perform the task. Betty took the thirty-odd volumes into Larkin's office inthe Brynmor Jones Library at Hull University and fed them page by page into a paper shredder—the task took all afternoon. With characteristic loyalty and discretion, she didnot attempt to read the diaries before destroying them, "but I couldn't help seeing little bits and pieces. They were very unhappy. Desperate, really."Después de morir, Larkin indicó a su amante Monica Jones que sus diarios debían ser destruidos. Mónica llamó a otra de las amantes de Larkin, su secretaria Betty
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