Larkin / Burnett The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin

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ISBN: 978-0-571-29499-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 768 Seiten

This entirely new edition brings together all of Philip Larkin's poems. In addition to those in Collected Poems (1988), and in the Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), some unpublished pieces from Larkin's typescripts and workbooks are included, as well as verse (by turns scurrilous, satirical, affectionate, and sentimental) tucked away in his letters. The manuscript and printed sources have been scrutinized afresh; more detailed accounts than hitherto available of the sources of the text and of dates of composition are provided; and previous accounts of composition dates have been corrected. Variant wordings from Larkin's typescripts and the early printings are recorded. For the first time, the poems are given a comprehensive commentary. This draws critically upon, and substantially extends, the accumulated scholarship on Larkin, and covers closely relevant historical contexts, persons and places, allusions and echoes, and linguistic usage. Due prominence is given to the poet's comments on his poems, which often outline the circumstances that gave rise to a poem, or state what he was trying to achieve. Larkin played down his literariness, but his poetry enrichingly alludes to and echoes the writings of many others; Archie Burnett's commentary establishes him as a more complex and more literary poet than many readers have suspected.

Philip Larkin, poet, novelist and librarian, was born in Coventry in 1922. He published four volumes of poetry - The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) - for which he received innumerable honours including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the WH Smith Award. He also wrote two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and his journalism is collected in two volumes, All What Jazz: A Record Diary and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. He worked as librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. In 2003, he was chosen as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous fifty years by the Poetry Book Society; in 2008, The Times named him Britain's greatest post-war writer; and in 2016, a memorial stone in his name was unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Larkin, Philip

Burnett, Archie

Leseproben

Introduction

THIS EDITION AND PREVIOUS EDITIONS

This edition includes all of Larkin’s poems whose texts are accessible.1 In all but a few cases, the poems were completed by Larkin, or, viewed in their context, are self-contained. By this latter criterion, verses from letters, mainly short, and by turns sentimental, affectionate, satirical and scurrilous, are included.2 These were omitted from Philip Larkin: Collected Poems (1988) ‘a little regretfully’ (p. xxi) by the editor, Anthony Thwaite, who in any case printed many of them in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985 (1992), where they could be seen in context. In the present edition, in order to present texts from letters as verse, lineation and punctuation have sometimes been regularised. Some unfinished poems preserved in typescript by the poet are also included, as in Collected Poems (1988). Typescripts were made by him subsequent to drafting in his workbooks, and, though he sometimes altered their wording by hand, they represent a substantiated stage of composition.3 A number of these have not been published before. Excluded, however, are mere scraps of verse such as those he mentions in early letters to James Sutton as having flitted into his head as a possible poem or (more usually) part of one. Some pieces from the workbooks that contain no uncancelled alternative readings and may be complete are incorporated, but not fragments, or drafts with uncancelled alternative readings.4

In Collected Poems (1988), Anthony Thwaite announced that he had enlarged the poetic corpus by printing for the first time sixty-one poems dating from 1946 to 1983, and another twenty-two from 1938 to 1945.5 In Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), A. T. Tolley added many more:

Almost all the poems that Larkin completed after 1950 were published by him; and they were included in the original Collected Poems. However, while Larkin completed about a hundred and sixty poems between 1950 and his death in 1985, he wrote over two hundred and fifty poems between 1938 and 1946.6

Why, then, given the existence of Collected Poems and Tolley’s volume, a new edition? An accurate text is, and always must be, the chief justification. Collected Poems (1988) contains a scattering of errors, some of which were subsequently corrected.7 Tolley’s edition is another matter altogether: its text of the poems contains 72 errors of wording, 47 of punctuation, 8 of letter-case, 5 of word-division, 4 of font and 3 of format.8 (For details see the notes in the commentary of the present edition on the texts of individual poems.) No review picked up on this, but that is because reviewers on the whole do not have time, or take time, to investigate the sources of the texts: this is one reason why editors must bear large responsibilities. Some of the other shortcomings of the volume involve inconsistent editorial practice: sometimes clear errors (often the result of Larkin’s typing) are cumbersomely reproduced, with ‘[sic]’ (or sometimes ‘[sic]’) inserted intrusively in the main body of the text of the poems; but at other times errors go uncorrected, or are corrected silently.9 In the present edition, Larkin’s errors in the texts of poems are identified in the notes, and corrected. Minor errors in letters are corrected silently.

In the case of poems printed in Collected Poems (1988), Tolley routinely proves an uncritical follower of the text, dates and bibliographical information supplied. But when there are errors, it serves the interests of neither poet nor reader to reproduce them. In the present edition, the primary sources have been examined independently with a view to correcting errors of any kind.

Bibliographical information on the sources of the texts is given in more detail than in previous editions. The record of sources in Collected Poems (1988) and Tolley (2005) is often unhelpfully rudimentary (as in ‘TS’), or lacking altogether. When archives are large, or when more than one version of a text exists, it is necessary to specify sources explicitly.10 Also given is an approximate indication of the extent of drafts in Larkin’s eight workbooks, in order to convey some sense of what the process of composition entailed. (Famous poems like Church Going and The Whitsun Weddings, for instance, did not come easily.11) ‘Nine pages of drafts’ should not be taken to mean that drafts may be found on nine pages, but rather that the drafts amount in bulk to nine workbook pages.

Dates are supplied for the various versions of poems as they evolved. One advantage of doing this is that the process of composition is charted more faithfully than in an overall chronological arrangement based on a single date for each poem. Larkin wrote dates throughout his workbooks, and this makes it possible to be precise about the points at which, or between which, drafting of a poem began and ended. It was his practice to type up a poem as soon as drafting in the workbooks had been completed, and though he sometimes made subsequent alterations by hand,12 the date of the typescript can usually be calculated from the point when composition in the workbook ceased. Evidence outside the workbooks for dates comes from typescript collections of early poems that Larkin made, from correspondence, from independent witnesses and from publications.

In Collected Poems (1988), it was the editor’s policy to give the completion date for each poem, wherever possible.13 However, the phrase ‘completion date’ is ambiguous: it turns out to mean the date by which all of the poem is represented in some form – a complete draft; not, as one might surmise, the date on which Larkin stopped working on the poem. This often results in a misleading account of the workbook evidence alone. A ‘completion date’ of 12 October 1944 is given for Night-Music (poem XI in TNS) in both editions of Collected Poems and in Tolley’s edition of Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), and one of the drafts in Workbook 1 does indeed bear the date ‘12. x. 44’. But the drafts, beginning after ‘8. x. 44’, continue substantially after 12 October 1944 and before the next date in the workbook, 23 October 1944. The drafts fall, therefore, between 8 and 23 October 1944, the latter being the date by which the poet stopped drafting the poem in the workbook. The completion date for Reasons for Attendance is given as 30 December 1953 in Collected Poems (1988), 80. But the complete draft dated ‘30 xii 53’ is preceded by another draft, complete inasmuch as all of the poem is represented in it, and it is dated ‘29 xii 53’. The completion date of 16 January 1951 given in Collected Poems (1988), 52, for Next, Please, is corrected in Collected Poems (2003), 203, to 10 January 1951. However, the draft dated ‘10. 1. 51’ lacks lines 15–20, and the whole poem was not represented in some form until a draft of lines 1–20 was completed on the next page before ‘6 Feb’. ‘Unfinished Poem’ is dated ‘1951’ in Collected Poems (1988), 61. There are eight pages of drafts after 22 August 1951 in Workbook 2, but only of six stanzas: the ten stanzas printed from a typescript Larkin made are not represented until five pages of drafts before 22 January 1953 in Workbook 3. The date 1 February 1976 given in Collected Poems (1988), 206, for ‘Morning at last: there in the snow’ cannot be a completion date: it applies only to a draft of the first three lines. Nor can 12 October 1944 be the completion date for ‘Within the dream you said’ (TNS X): that date is written in Workbook 1 below a draft of the first verse only.

But this is to consider only the workbook evidence: when a poem had been substantially drafted, Larkin would make revisions at typescript stage, or when he made typescript collections, or prior to publication or republication. The evidence of the workbooks and typescripts is in fact hardly ever the whole of the story of composition: all the versions of the text must be collated with the text as finally printed in order to establish the point at which he stopped making changes. A fuller account in the commentary of the bibliographical evidence and dates is less likely to mislead, and should in any case give a more vivid sense of the poet at work. The dates given in the present edition are therefore more precise than those previously available, and in quite a number of cases wrong dates have been silently corrected.14 The earliest and latest dates of composition are given in a chronological list at the end of the volume.

Also recorded, for the first time, are variant wordings from typescripts and manuscripts late in the composition process, and from printings that precede, or, in cases like some of the poems in In the Grip of Light and XX Poems, succeed, the published versions. In order to preserve the published versions as they were constituted originally (apart from errors and misprints), versions of the text that postdate them are placed among variant wordings. Variants in punctuation, word-division, letter-case or font are not recorded. To record even only variants in wording from the extensive drafts in the eight large workbooks, and from other manuscripts bearing early drafts, would require a large and complex...