Coleridge or Eliot

Price · Guest

Well for me, it has to be THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER and THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and TS Eliot respectively. They kind of bookstop my collection, Coleridge who brings a radical voice to UK poetry, breaking Milton's grasp (awful bore). Many forget that Coleridge along with Wordsworth started the Romantic movement and were radicals, more so than Shelley and Byron. And then Eliot with his beautiful sparse fears in Prufrock, as I get older, I too realise these fears and also realise the fear that Eliot had a bit of a strangle hold on c20th poetry, along with another bore, bloody Larkin.

John S · Joined: 05 Sep 2008 Posts: 2 Location: Somerset

I can't agree about 'bloody Larkin' being a bore. I used to when I was younger, but then most established poets seemed boring and irrelevant to me then. Now I think he is an amazing poet. It is necessary, of course, to get under the skin of a poet before you can really appreciate him/her and many poets don't make that easy. Larkin is one of those who often demands rather a lot from the reader and that's a surprise because one normally expects the demand to be from Eliot or Pound or other Modernist poets. But they make demands of the intellect with their refined references and allusions; Larkin makes demands of the emotions because he doesn't compromise on what he really feels.
_________________
John Stuart
Chairman
Fire River Poets
www.fireriverpoets.org.uk

Michelle McGrane · Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 12:51 pm Post subject: Philip Larkin

I agree with John. I don't feel poems like High Windows, This Be the Verse, Aubade, Toads and Talking in Bed can accurately be described as boring.

+++ · Guest

I was thinking about Larkin recently.

I wouldn't call Larkin boring, but I would say that he pushes very hard in a certain direction, and thus if he did have a strangle-hold (if people copied him without thinking) this would be a bad thing (just like Milton).

Boredom and a kind of jadedness are usually involved in his poems as a sort of theme, if not always the subject. Certainly he makes an art out of it, but it's not an art I like (I much prefer Beckett's plays to Larkin's poetry, if it's acceptable to compare work in two different forms). He wanted to take poetry back to the 'English lyric', that is English poetry as it was pre-modernism, and he was a supporter of A.E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, etc. He had similar ideas about jazz. It's a humane conservatism, but again I don't personally like it.