Philip Larkin

I've never been a fan of poetry, given my (increasingly) limited patience with "opaque" language in general. (An impatience that also explains my difficulties with most of the literary theory texts I'm obliged to read.)

Philip Larkin is a rare poet to have piqued my interest, most likely because he pretty consistently works in accessible language.  The man himself seems to have had serious issues (* sigh *), but the poems don't bring the most deplorable of his issues to the forefront.

I think his work is sometimes characterized as sour; I'm struck more by the pervasive melancholy, and his speakers' frustration with their own cynicism, while also apparently feeling that such cynicism is the only way to cope with their circumstances and their insights into their own character. This Be The Verse is probably his most famous poem, possibly because the first line is startling--not because of the f-bomb (although that may have been a little shocking when the poem was first published), but by the bluntness of the opening sentiment, which is about as transparent as you can get, in poetry.

It's the first two lines of the last stanza that get to me:

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like the coastal shelf.

He's not talking about depression here, per se, but I suspect depression informed the image. So many people who've suffered from depression seem to opt for water imagery to describe it--not characterizing the experience as suffocation, but more of a sense of going under, amplified by the sensation of a vast immense sadness always waiting. Even when the water isn't yet closing over your head, it's still out there, deepening off the coastal shelf.