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Book Review: ‘Further Requirements’ by Philip Larkin

This collection of miscellaneous writings by Philip Larkin is a posthumous sequel to his excellent earlier collection Required Writing. As it mainly comprises pieces Larkin chose to omit from this earlier work, it is hardly surprising Further Requirements is not quite as good as its predecessor, but don’t let that put you off: this is still an excellent book.

Larkin writes intelligently, authoritatively, and with considerable wit. A few snippets I enjoyed:

“I had grown up to regard sexual recreation as a socially remote thing, like baccarat or clog dancing, and nothing happened to alter this view.”
“The influence of another poet is not primarily on the choice of words but on the choice of subject.”
“I suppose than an actual reading of a poem by its author can be helpful: you can hear where he puts the stresses, whether he sounds ironic or flippant or serious. You go back to the text with a firmer grasp on what he meant. […But a] vocal rendering alone, particularly of a poem you're not familiar with, misses so much that the eye picks up naturally—punctuation, stanza-shape, where one is in the poem, how far from the end, that kind of thing.”
(Quoting Cyril Connelly:) “Never praise; praise dates you … Remember that the object of the critic is to revenge himself on the creator”
“It may be objected that one cannot derogate literature by calling it literary, but alas, one can. To be literary means to receive one's strongest impressions—one's subject matter—secondhand from literature instead of first-hand from experience, and to set it down in terms and styles that have already lost their freshness by being used by someone else instead of thinking of your own.”
“Almost all translations seem to me condemned to be poetic zombies, assemblages of properties walking around with no informing intelligence or soul, unless the original poem can be digested in the imagination of it translator and used to produce a new poem.”
“My objection to the genre [of poetry collections] is quite simply that they are not collections but selections. If one is interested in a poet one wants all his poems in the order they were published, not a selection according to his own idea of himself reshuffled to conceal how bad he was when he started, the whole with lots of alterations to suit the latest fashion in adjectives. Above all one does not want it tied up with new material. If I have the first six volumes, then to compel me to buy the bulk of them all over again in order to get the seventh is something for which, as Jack Tanner said, I know no polite name.”
“Most people today, if asked to name the worst of the vices would pick Cruelty, and yet it was never one of the Seven Deadly Sins. In fact it is remarkable how the Deadly Seven have been assimilated into our society: Pride and Anger, true, are still regarded as suitable cases for treatment, but only in terms of psychopathology; Lust and Gluttony are flourishing industries While the rest have achieved political amalgamation and on occasion the responsibility of government.”
“The only miracle worth talking about is immortality.”
“in England the essay, as a literary form, is pretty well extinct. It belonged to an age when reading—reading almost anything—was the principal entertainment of the educated class; this called for a plethora of dailies, weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies, all having to be filled. And what filled them, a lot of the time, was essays—not critical essays, or polemical essays, but what Mr Epstein calls familiar essays: on not going to the movies any more, on forgetfulness, on books and their many properties, on letters one gets and the letters one would like to get.”