If he had been writing in Petersburg in 1910 or thereabouts Philip Larkin would probably have been an Acmeist. He would have been in protest, that is to say, against the portentousness of the Symbolists, like Blok and Bely, against their bogus pleasure in the idea of Apocalypse, and their bogus parade of the mysterious and the 'unknowable'. In his essay 'The Pleasure Principle' Larkin observes that 'it is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated,' such as the writing of a poem. The poet becomes obsessed about his feeling for something: he constructs a verbal device that will reproduce this feeling 'in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time'. The third stage is the reader's setting off the device successfully, without which 'the poem can hardly be said to exist in a practical sense at all.'

LRB 24 January 1991 | PDF Download