Trying here to respond to some of the many points that have been raised in
the recent flurry, though I'm afraid this will be without any strict logical
order.
The issue of 'paternity' in relation to Larkin and Duffy was raised, now I
don't see how saying any writer, of whatever sexual orientation, is reacted
to on the basis of gender in relation to questions of literary influence. I
can think of many a 'son of Larkin' for example and don't think it could be
claimed that my opinion of those writers can be claimed to be based on
gender responses.
The point about the 'plain speech' tradition in the UK is more to the point:
quite correctly its origin, in literary terms, was placed in Wordsworth
polemics, and too it was noted that the selection of the 'real language'
used by real mean' wasn't anything of the sort, rather it was a new
alignment of literary rhetoric. Hardy stands at a peculiar crossroads in
this tradition, his was both of and not of it, and his literary inheritance
has had varied effects. Graves, who has been much mentioned, was very much
of that lineage, as of course was Larkin, who reprised the Wordsworthian
approach by, subsequent to his reaction against the earlier influences of
writers like Yeats, used Hardy as a nub in establishing a rhetoric of his
own, and Larkin's poetry is nothing if not rhetorical.
But Larkin wasn't writing in a void: his work represents in part a reaction
against the immediate post-war breaking down of social barriers, inasmuch as
that was a reality, a very relative dissolution of status I'd say, and I'm
talking exclusively about Britain here, and a reinforcement of 'class'. A
peculiar reinforcement that seemed to have no real faith in what it believed
in, except the nostalgias of 'never such innocence again'. The social
reality that accompanied this writing was the Fifties, the era of hire
purchase deregulation, 'you've never had it so good', Suez and the
death-rattles of Empire, the long shadows of the past wars and the new Cold
one.
Where his real successors come in was in the mid-to-late Eighties, in the
heydays of Mrs T, again you have an emphasis on 'plain speech' covering a
rhetoric that is deeply bourgeois in its modellings of reality, but now it
is the rhetoric of the provided-for consumer, rather than the deprived
monuments to frustration and bicycle clips of the Fifties. I don't see any
fundamental change in the main trends of UK poetry since then, exceptions
there are, yes, but essentially it is a poetry predicated on class modified
by consumerism rather than traditions of status.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
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