Autumn 1994
Volume 21, Number 1

""I should think," wrote the teenage Philip Larkin in 1940, "poetry & sex are very closely connected." This connection would become the one for which Larkin's work has mostly been remembered, not least in the light of his Selected Letters, published in late 1992, in which this significant remark appears. Consider these two short quotations from his poetry, which have been more deeply ingrained on the English postwar imagination than any other of his lines. Both are taken from his final and most controversial volume, High Windows(1974). The first is the declaration in "Annus Mirabilis" that "sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three," to which he adds- in a moment of parenthetical disengenuousness- "(which was rather late for me)." The second, which Larkin himself felt was fortunate to escape the Oxford Book of Quotations, comes from the opening stanza to "This Be the Verse":

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
[CP, p.180]

Shifting their carefully weighed sets of monosyllables around the caesuras, these epigrammatic lines have served as a touchstone in contemporary journalism. Since 1992 alone they recurred several times in the columns of the Independent newspaper (one of the so-called quality dailies), these sentiments must be speaking to something felt pervasively in English culture. To this day, then, Larkin seems to be telling some homespun truth. But, as the hot- tempered debate of Larkin's letters encourages us to believe, his obscenity is informed by prejudices that are not by any means ordinary, commonplace, or acceptable as the poetic language in which they are so plainly spelled out."

Joseph Bristow is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York, England, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Women's Studies. He is the editor of Sexual Sameness: The Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing (1992). His most recent full-length study, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885, will be published in 1995.