Why is Philip Larkin most novelists favourite poet?
LAST WEEK, MY COLLEAGUE ON THIS page wrote a piece about poetry and how it functions for her as a tonic for the soul. I feel this too, but recently had my own affection for poetry challenged by the poet Nick Laird, after a panel that I was on at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, when I talked about how much I loved Philip Larkin. Nick, himself also a novelist, said to me afterwards: “Novelists, they always love Larkin.” By which I think he was not being negative about Larkin, but was making a point about how many types of poetry there are. Novelists love Larkin because he is a narrative poet: not narrative in the Victorian, Longfellow, telling-a-story-in-185-stanzas sense, but in that he tends to describe concrete experience, things that he has seen — a tourist poster for Prestatyn, some weddings from a train, the trees coming into leaf — and then alchemises that into something larger, into poetry. He is, in a sense, prosaic, partly in his subject matter, but also in that
