To the Editors:
In his appreciation of Philip Larkin (“Trying to Preserve Something,” The New Criterion, February 1986), Robert Richman cites Seamus Heaney’s 1982 essay on Larkin for the proposition that Larkin’s poetic career reflects a struggle between Yeats’s visionary interests and Hardy’s more skeptical qualities. Just to fill out the record: Andrew Motion’s study of Larkin—noted by Mr. Richman in his January 1986 review of Motion’s Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984—makes a similar argument, tracing the tension between provincialism and symbolism, restraint and emotion, throughout Larkin’s work. Motion’s book was also published in 1982.
Although Heaney, according to Mr. Richman, believes that the phrases “O wolves of memory! Immensements!” from “Sad Steps” represent the “symbolic transports” associated with Yeats, the context in which these phrases appear actually demonstrates an attempt to rein in standard hyperbolic descriptions of the moon:
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young. . . .
Thus, “Sad Steps” strengthens the common argument of Messrs. Heaney, Motion, and Richman, rather than representing just the Yeatsian side of Larkin’s coin.
Conrad Bahlke
Washington, D.C.
To the Editors:
In the February 1986 issue of The New Criterion, Robert Richman offers a brief and, I think, inaccurate reading of Philip Larkin’s poem
