"Poetry: The Ultimate Guide" by Richard Bradford (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

With section headings like "What is poetry?", "Evaluation" and "Why do we write and read poetry?", this book was hard to ignore.

Re "What is poetry?" he emphasises "double pattern" - the medium and the message. In "Evaluation" he suggests that aspects of the medium and the message are first explored, then how those two work together. here are some quotes -

• we should add a third element to tenor and vehicle: the 'ground' [context] of the metaphor ... the dynamics of contrasting and associating verbal images has unsettled the stabilizing function of ground or context, p.14
• the relation between the vehicles unsettles the relation between vehicle, tenor and ground, p.15
• When we deconstruct a text, we show how its apparent affirmation or order or truth is constantly unsettled by its necessary dependence upon the falsifications of language ... The problem that had taxed the New Critics was of how to return the perverse, irrational discourse of poetry to the world in which language is supposed to disclose truths and make sense. Deconstruction provided not so much a solution as an escape from the problem. Deconstructionists argue that out attempts to distil an unrefined and immutable truth from any kind of linguistic text is a contradiction in terms since language creates rather than mediates truth, p.23
• The period when the so-called 'Augustan couplet' was the predominant feature of all verse was the one in the history of poetry when the collective will of poets and the broader cultural establishment maintained that the principal criteria for acceptable poetic writing were clarity, precision and coherence, p.37
• because the material that we draw upon to make poems is also the stuff of wills, death certificates, constitutions and declarations of undying love between very real people, our breaking and rewriting of the rules that govern non-poetic language are much more than indulgence or entertainment, p.40
• Andrew Marvell is seen as the only poet of any worth who maintained the Metaphysical tradition into the later 17th century, p.60
• Donald Davie ... divided poetry into five stylistic types: subjective, dramatic, objective, like music, like mathematics ,p.71
• the heroic couplet was used in more than half the poems published between 1660 and 1750, p.74
• The paradox that had beset Romanticism, of how the 'real language of men' could be reconciled with a medium that was self-evidently separate from 'real' discourse, had become the poem's means of self-preservation, p.101
• The early Modernists, primarily the Imagists, had engaged with the ideals and objectives of the Romantics and, in practice, had been far more pioneering and radical in their attempts to realize them, p.108
• the Modernist and post-modern poem are the same thing. No other aesthetic genre, linguistic, visual or musical, involves the same degree of formal continuity, p.115
• after the 1950s ... Literary history is now complete ... There can, of course, be limitless combinations and permutations ... but none in their own right will ever again involve a break with convention ,p.119
• The poem is the point at which the rational and the illogical are caused, deliberately, to coexist and interact, p.166
• poems are, by their nature, self-deconstructive ... the poet is the conscious premeditated source of these acts of auto-deconstruction, p.171
• Three women, Hilda Doolittle ('HD'), Harriet Monroe and Amy Lowell were actively involved in the Imagist rebellion against the entrapment of the lyrical 'I' within the forms and conventions of a male-dominated high culture, p.196
• Poets such as [Tom] Leonard and Kwesi Johnson regard conventional poetic structures and indeed the orthodoxies of standard English as hostages to cultural hegemony. They are, however, in the minority, p.226
• In terms purely of skill and technique, good poets are those who create a fertile contrapuntal relationship between the two dimensions of the double pattern ... the quality of a poem is concomitant with the poet's success in creating from the double pattern a perspective upon a theme, idea, experience or object that cannot be obtained via non-poetic language, p.243
• excellence is apparent when naturalization [i.e. paraphrasing] appears unproblematic but where it is equally evident that the skills employed by the poet achieve the apparent state of transparency, and test and sometimes exceed the capacities of the critic to describe how they do so, p.250
• For much of the [1700s] Poems could indeed address any idea or theme but they could do so only as ostentatious subsidaries to the work undertaken by prose, p.256
• it can be no accident that the emergence of Romanticism brought with it a collateral programme of writings that sought to justify the independence of poetry according to purely aesthetic principles, p.257
• We attempt to form a paraphrase of the poem, yet the poem, by its very nature, resists us. It is the dynamic between these two trajectories that holds the key to our attraction to poetry, p.258

"The Importance of Elsewhere" by Richard Bradford (Frances Lincoln Ltd, 2015)

It's a book about Larkin's photos with chapters entitled "Monica", "Lucky Jim", "Celebrity", etc. About 5000 of his prints and negatives are in the Hull History Centre, and some are in the reviews mentioned below. He was serious about photography, owning a "Houghton-Butcher Ensign Carbine no.5", a "Purma Special" then a "Rolleiflex Automat twin lens reflex". There are the expected photos of trains, churches and street signs. He often cropped photos (perhaps so that he didn't need to get too close to the subject). He photographed different woman in similar poses and places. He sometimes cycled miles to photograph gloomy, bleak places.

The complex Larkin-Amis-Monica triangle is only one of the situations where selective secrecy prevailed. There's photographic evidence of Larkin's affairs with married women, who clearly found him attractive both in long-term and short-term ways. Here are some miscellaneous quotes -

• His father Sydney's council office contained Nazi regalia including a 12 inch Fuhrer which saluted at the press of a button. He had advanced tastes in literature - Eliot, Joyce, etc. "Sydney treated Larkin as his beloved alter ego" (p.24).
• "Without loathing any person in particular [Larkin] resented the network of relationships and friendships that, daily, demanded some kind of emotional accountability" (p.74)
• "One does not require any knowledge of psychology to discern a link between Larkin's growing sense of inadequacy as a writer and his new investment [in a camera]" (p.75)
• "One cannot overstate the effect that the move to Belfast had on his work - it wrought the transformation of Larkin from frustrated novelist to the finest English poet of the last twentieth century" (p.80)
• "He now felt more confident as an outsider" (p.81)
• "For the next two decades Larkin and Kitty [his sister] would argue continuously over who should be more involved with the care of their mother" (p.84)
• "Anything that carried even a remote indication of commitment, including such apparently innocuous activities as buying plates and table lamps, felt ominous to Larkin." (p.125)
• "Larkin's poetic output between 1956 and 1960 was relatively infrequent - on average two and a half poems a year" (p.153)
• "for Larkin [Conquest] supplied pornographic magazines ... 'I admire the painstaking realism of it ... the action and standard of definition left something to be desired'" (p.155)
• "Larkin opened a Scotland Yard embossed envelope informing him that he, Philip Arthur Larkin, should make himself ready to attend court proceedings already being undertaken under the Obscene Publications Act of 1921 ... Larkin ... spent the day in the offices of his solicitor." (p.155). But it was a trick composed by Amis and Conquest.
• "Often, Larkin placed a large mirror behind the timed camera so that he could form an expression" (p.189)
• He could compartmentalise his life. When Monica learns of his unfaithfulness, his letters to her are strange - "The sense of empathy and compassion is by parts convincing and bizarre. He has caused her misery yet he seems to have taken a step back to a point where he can console her without a collateral requirement to take responsibility, let alone apologise" (p.197)
• "he treated [his mother] as his emotional alter ego" (p.241)
• "He was respected for his [librarianship] achievements throughout the UK by fellow librarians ... He enquired about early retirement, knowing that he could never deal with the prospect" (p.241)

Other reviews

• Sean O'Hagan
• Sarah Freeman
• Duncan White