Larkin's INNER STAGE

When my mother and father were first getting to know each other back in the early 1940s, Philip Larkin was publishing his first poems. In the early to mid-1950s when my mother investigated and then joined the Baha’i Faith in Canada, Larkin began to establish himself as one of the foremost figures in 20th century poetry. Of course, I was not interested in any of this, the Bahá’í Faith or poetry, still in my childhood as I was playing in the streets, watching my first TV programs and becoming increasingly aware, even then, of the beauty of the opposite sex.

By the time Larkin died in 1985 at the age of 63, he was still not on my radar screen. The serious study and writing of poetry had, by then, just begun. My mother had also, by then, died and I had taken up her interest in the Baha’i Faith. I was a pioneer for the Canadian Baha’i community and living in Katherine in Australia’s Northern Territory, working as a teacher, had three children and my nose was to the proverbial grindstone.

When I retired in 1999 after 50 years in classrooms as a student and a teacher, when my three children had left home and my wife and I had taken a sea-change in Tasmania, I got to be more acquainted with the poetry of Larkin. I had become a poet myself; my acquaintance with the Baha’i Faith by 2003 was in its 50th year and I had hundreds of thousands of readers on the internet. This prose-poem was written in my 65th year in appreciation for the poetry and life of a man whom I had just begun to get to know.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs: My Memoirs, 16 November 2008.

I, too, Philip, was had my deeply
melancholic and introverted times.
I, too, came to find words gave me
a sense of power and control of a
world from which I felt divorced
after half a century of intense and
gregarious engagement....Writing
became a psychological necessity
for me, too, Philip—a pleasurable
and often intolerable wrestle with
words, as Eliot had told us it was.

We both had a need for solitude, eh
Philip?----as far back as childhood.
And it had become an obsession in
the evening of our life, eh Philip?

Now that your dramatic life on that
inner stage is gone, Philip, some say
you were the greatest poet of your
generation who made others feel they
were poets, too, in the midst of their
ordinary, their commonplace, existence.

Ron Price
16 November 2008

Larkin the best of his generation? well in English, in the 50s, Dylan Thomas was a far more original voice, and later, I would name others, preferably Elizabeth Bishop. Yet I guess to each his own.

Either way though, I don't see where you are going with this. Though perhaps you gave an answer:

"made others feel they
were poets, too, in the midst of their
ordinary, their commonplace, existence."

The poem doesn't seem to work, for me, as a poem, and acts more as an address to Larkin. The act of reading poetry is often very personal, and I don't think you are conveying anything - how do you say - of interest - to the reader.

Ron Price, I haven't seen you around in ages. Welcome back. :) As to Larkin, he may be important theme wise, but frankly I've never found his voice all that interesting. What makes his poetry stand out? It's never captured me. I much rather read Ted Hughes. But perhaps this is just personal preference.

Larkin's poetry captivates me, but I don't know Ted Hugues well enough to compare them. He's a very human poet, in the sense that he wrote lots of crap poems :p But his successes are very beautiful indeed. And they speak to something in me - the part that says that we're all fragile, that we've all had hopes that have been dashed by life, that we're all disappointed, or going to be disappointed, in a certain way, but that that doesn't stop us from reaching out for an ideal, even if it's already lost.

I think he's often misunderstood - mainly because of what he said of himself (that he was accessible to everyone, wrote for everyone - which is quite untrue, since a few of his poems are rather hermetic) and because of the scandal that followed the publication of his letters (yes, he was a terrible misogynist, racist etc. but that doesn't make his work any less beautiful). The simplicity of his style is rather deceptive too, because he's also often rather ironical, which means that even when they seem straightforwards, you have to think about the poems a lot before arriving at a conclusion about what they're supposed to mean.

I guess Bitterfly I will have to give Larkin aother look. Thanks.

Back in my early twenties, Larkin was a discovery and a wonder for me. He's still one of my all-time favs.

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. (T.S. Eliot in “Homage to Philip Larkin,” John Banville, in The New York Review of Books, Volume 53, Number 3, February 23, 2006.) Of course, if indeed I be a great poet, it will not be because I have written an epic but in spite of it. Whatever greatness accrues to my writing, prose or poetry, it will be due to my association with the Bahá’í Faith and the relevance of my writing to the development of the Bahá’í Faith over four epochs.

Classical scholar, J.B. Hainsworth says that “the defining feature of an epic is that it combines expansiveness of form with greatness of soul and a clear focus on a central theme of universal appeal.” Hainsworth goes on to say that this combination was first achieved in the Iliad where a concise and focussed narrative centered on the idea of heroism. While I would not want to make any claims to greatness of soul, being only too aware of my limitations and weaknesses, my association with a great epic of our time embodied in the history of the Baha’i Faith, gives to this work of mine some of the reflected light of that great epic.

I have begun to see all of this poetry somewhat like Pound’s Cantos which draws on a massive body of print, or the Confucian Analects, a word which means literary gleanings. The Cantos, the longest poem in modern history, over eight hundred pages and written over more than fifty years(1916 to 1968), are a great mass of literary gleanings. So is this true of my poetry. The conceptualization of my work as epic has come long after its beginnings. My poetry slowly defined itself as an epic after half a dozen years of intense and extensive writing and many more years, perhaps as many as thirty, of occasional writing. I began to see my poetic opus as one immense poem. I like to think this poetry creates one voice, a voice for future times, to the Baha’i culture I’ve inhabited all these years.

Pound was twenty-nine when he began to write his epic. I was fifty three when I began to see all my poetry, poetry I began writing at the age of thirty-six or, perhaps, as far back as eighteen, as part of one immense epic. Pound was acutely conscious that the cultural, the historical tradition had broken down and he was searching for a new basis, “new laws of divine justice.” His task was to reassemble this tradition or, at least, search in history where not only the fall from innocence was located but also the locus for the process of redemption could be found. I, too, was aware of this breakdown.

I, too, felt the need to reassemble history, not as Pound did, but rather to find truths which were perennial but not archaic within the broad framework of a new Revelation, the Baha'i, a Revelation which defined and described the continuities and was Itself a basis for redemption in this new and complex age.

Written now, for the most part, over a little more than 17 years(1992-2009), the epic I am writing covers a pioneering life of 47 years. It also covers much more. I have now sent 39 booklets to the Baha’i World Centre Library: one for each year of this pioneering venture. But the epic journey that is at the base of this poetic opus is not only a personal one of over forty years back to the time I became a Baha’i, it is also the journey of this new System, the World Order of Baha’u’llah, which has its origins as far back as the 1840s and, if one includes the two precursors to this System, as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century when many of the revolutions and forces that are at the beginning of modern history have their origin: the American and French revolutions, the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the revolution in the arts and sciences.

Generally, the way my narrative imagination conceives of this epic is itself an attempt to connect this long and complex history to my own life, as far as possible, to that of the religion to which I belong. I have sought and found, in recent years, a narrative voice that contains uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness among shifting fields of reference and of a certainty mixed with and defining itself by the presence of its polar opposite, doubt.

Since this poetry is inspired by so much that is, and has been, part of the human condition, this epic it could be said has at its centre Life Itself and the most natural and universal of human activities, the act of creating narratives. When we die all that remains is our story. From a Bahá’í perspective much is taken on into the eternal realm and whatever part we have played in the advancement of civilization is also left. But that part is often obscure, especially in the case of the ordinarily ordinary person which I have been on this mortal coil.

I have called this poetic work an epic because it deals with events, as all epics do, that are or will be significant to the entire society. It contains what Charles Handy, philosopher, business man and writer, calls the golden seed....enough for now.-Ron in Tasmania