![]() The poets of the group were Wain, Gunn, Davie and, funnily enough, Alvarez. But it certainly never occurred to me that I had anything in common with Thom Gunn, or Donald Davie, for instance, or they with each other and in fact I wasn’t mentioned at the beginning. Then there was an article in The Spectator actually using the term ‘Movement’ and Bob Conquest’s New Lines in 1956 put us all between the same covers. It got attacked in a very convenient way, and consequently we became lumped together. But the Movement, if you want to call it that really began when John Wain succeeded John Lehmann on that BBC programme John planned six programmes called First Readings including a varied set of contributors – they weren’t all Movementeers by any means. The only other writer I felt I had much in common with was Kingsley Amis, who wasn’t really at that time known a writer – Lucky Jim was published in 1954 – but of course we’d been exchanging letters and showing each other work for a long time, and I think we laughed at the same things and agreed largely about what you could and couldn’t write about, and so on. You are generally written up as one of the fathers of this social movement did you have any sense at the time of belonging to a group with any very definite aims? But to me the whole of the ancient world, the whole or classical and biblical mythology means very little, and I think that using them today not only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writer’s duty to be original. I think a lot of this ‘myth-kitty’ business has grown out of that, because first of all you have to be terribly educated, you have to have read everything to know these things, and secondly you’ve got somehow to work them in to show that you are working them in. One never thinks about other poems except to make sure that one isn’t doing something that has been done before – writing a verse play about a young man whose father has died and whose mother has married his uncle, for instance. ![]() I can’t take this evolutionary view of poetry. This was linked with the belief that you can to a view of poetry which is almost mechanistic, that every poem must include all previous poems, in the same way that a Ford Zephyr has somewhere in it a Ford T Model – which means that to be any good you’ve got to have read all previous poems. You know, when Americans began visiting Europe towards the end of the last century, what they used to say about them was that they were keen on culture, laughably keen – you got jokes like ‘Elmer, is this Paris or Rome?’ ‘What day is it?’ ‘Thursday.’ ‘Then it’s Rome’ you know the kind of thing. I think that Eliot and Pound have something in common with the kind of Americans you used to get around 1910. What I do feel a bit rebellious about is that poetry seems to have got into the hands of a critical industry which is concerned with culture in the abstract, and this I do rather lay at the door of Eliot and Pound. You don’t feel in any way guilty about this, I imagine would you see yourself as rebelliously anti-modern-you have talked about the ‘myth-kitty’ and so on… Larkin: Well, granted that one doesn’t spend any time at all chinking about oneself in these terms, I would say that I have been most influenced by the poetry that I’ve enjoyed–and this poetry has not been Eliot or Pound or anybody who is normally regarded as ‘modern’-which is a sort of technique word, isn’t it? The poetry I’ve enjoyed has been the kind of poetry you’d associate with me, Hardy pre-eminently, Wilfred Owen, Auden, Christina Rossetti, William Barnes on the whole, people to whom technique seems to matter less than content, people who accept the forms they have inherited but use them to express their own content. I would like to ask you about your attitude to the so-called “modernist revolution’ in English poetry how important has it been to you as a poet? A librarian at the University of Hull for thirty years, he was offered the position of Poet Laureate in 1984 following the death of John Betjeman but declined. Larkin achieved critical success with his collections ‘ The Less Deceived‘ (1955), ‘ The Whitsun Weddings‘ (1964) and ‘ High Windows‘ (1974). ![]() British literary critic, reviewer, editor and publisher Ian Hamilton interviews poet Philip Larkin as one of four interviews, in which he similarly speaks to Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton and Charles Tomlinson. The following interview was first published in the November 1964 edition of The London Magazine, edited by Alan Ross. ![]()
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