Well, yes, I do very often worry about being normal, though my intellect
might reject that term - but worries are not intellectual. Which might in
part account for my finding Larkin's poetry very beautiful, very
frightening and powerful.
I like the essay for saying what seems obvious to me, that there are
eminent poets who on any reasonable assessment have done far more evil
things than Larkin ever did. In fact, his petty meannesses, discreditable
and ugly though they are, are something I just don't dwell on at all, so
convinced am I that everyone else is AT LEAST as bad as that, though of
course often in very different ways. Petty evil of the Larkin kind usually
goes to its grave still in disguise. I hope no-one feels insulted by this
insinuation - you are a saint, so forgive me!
But I don't really accept the argument of the essay - I mean, that we're
more disgusted about Larkin because his poems invite an identification
between author and reader, whereas e.g. Pound's do not. I think Larkin is
easy to read and Pound difficult to read, but I think it is possible and
quite permissible to read Pound in the same way as Larkin and to feel that
large swathes of his poetry written in the thirties and forties invite the
reader to participate in Pound's own brand of frontier Fascism. It's more
common to read the Cantos in a quite different way, cooller and more
pictorial, perhaps (I don't know) something like the approach that Mark
Weiss brings to bear on Larkin's poetry with such unrewarding results for
himself. I don't think any way of reading is right or wrong, we read as we
can't help doing but this has little to do with authors, it has more to do
with what's worked for us in the past, the kind of things we care about
and the ways we've learned to reach out for them.
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