Philip Larkin, British Culture,

and Four-letter Words

PHILIP LARKIN, LIBRARIAN, WAS GREETED at work one morning by a

message on the lift wall: FUCK OFF LARKIN YOU CUNT.1
By evening, Larkin grumbled to his good friend Kingsley Amis, the last
two words had been erased by some reader of more delicate mind who still
agreed with the main thesis. Felt like writing underneath YOU FUCK OFF
TOO LARKIN.2
The crassly informal attack, and the mock exchange Larkin makes of it in
his letter to Amis, make explicit a conict already present in Larkins poetry,
where swear words are exclusively linked to generational discord. As in the
anecdote above, the profane utterance occurs where social difference is
keenly felt, and sharpens the lines between age (Larkin was 58 at the time)
and youth, authority and deviance, celebrity and anonymity, and private
and public discourse. Though the grafti and the swear poems together
form a mutually sustaining dialogue, each provides a public context in
which the adversary cannot directly participate. The result is a kind of dual
mirroring effect, in which Larkin appropriates the language of the graftist,
who has done the same with the famously bad language of his own poems.
Neither appreciates, one gathers, seeing himself in the others glass.
A close look at Larkins use of swear words reveals a heightened, nearly
paralysing awareness of poetry as role-playing an awareness that below
the illusion of ones own voice is the disconcerting reality that language,
like political and social positions, is borrowed, inherited, or otherwise
affected. Larkins preoccupation with this feeling forms at times the substance of his poems, as when he laments the difculty of nding words
1
2

Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writers Life (London 1993) p. 483.

Ibid.

doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfu002
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly 2014.
This work is written by (a) US Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US.

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Ryan Hibbett

L A R K I N A N D F O U R - L E T T E R WO R D S

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M. W. Rowe, Philip Larkin: Art and Self (Basingstoke 2011) p. 7.

Janice Rossen, Philip Larkin: His Lifes Work (Iowa City 1989) p. 94.
5
Ibid., p. 129.
6
Daniel Torday, review of Larkins Collected Poems, Esquire, 1 May 2005;
accessed 6 Mar. 2013. http://www.esquire.com/features/man-at-his-best/
ESQ0504-MAYBIGBOOK.
7
Stephen Regan, Introduction, in id. (ed.), Philip Larkin (New York 1997) p. 2.
8
Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin and Symbolism, ibid., p. 32.
9
Stan Smith, Margins of Tolerance: Responses to Post-War Decline, ibid.,
p. 184.
4

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at once true and kind | Or not untrue and not unkind (Talking in Bed),
or seeks the dead, untalkative space of Here and High Windows. Poems
like Toads and Vers de Socit neatly contrast what the speaker would
like to say (Stuff your pension! and In a pigs arse respectively) from his publicly observed restraint. As M. W. Rowe observes, Larkin was oppressed by
a sense of self and self-consciousness the necessity of acting, willing, desiring, and seeing oneself as one amongst others.3 From such paralysis the
word fuck would seem to offer a momentary release a gruff outlet for the
poets pent-up frustrations with social constraints. Janice Rossen sees
Larkins strong language as an appropriate expression of passion,4 admiring in particular the stunning simplicity and bluntness of This Be the
Verse.5 Daniel Torday champions Larkin as more the mans poet of the
20th century than Bukowski or Kerouac. Who else, Torday asks, could
have had the balls to declare to the staid, poetry-reading world lines like
They fuck you up, your mum and dad?6 And yet one cannot quite shake
off the sense that the word is in some way disingenuous. Some critics downplay the opening of This Be the Verse as an affected set-up for something
quite different: Stephen Regan places it among Larkins dramatic gestures
that conceal a more composed and humanitarian outlook;7 Andrew
Motion nds its rage and contempt checked by the assuaging energy of
their language and the satisfactions of their articulate formal control,8 and
Stan Smith simply dismisses it as a bluff colloquialism.9
The reluctance to grant Larkin full authorship of his f-word the tendency to see the word as in some way inauthentic has to do not only with
its taboo implications, but with its special power to invoke class differences.
Though privately the word may have been enjoyed by the full spectrum of
British society, publicly it remained tied to the Welfare States disenfranchised, impoverished, and rebellious youth. Dick Hebdige describes the historical conditions from which the word emerged more publicly as an
expression of cultural alienation:

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When Larkin a self-deprecating conservative sandwiched awkwardly

between the Chatterley ban | And the Beatles rst LP (Annus Mirabilis)
says fuck, he privatises and reallocates a very class-charged term, subjecting it to the unifying forces and symbolic context of the poem itself. It is no
shock that his wall-scratching detractor (Larkin was less than welcoming, his
letters show, when it came to the student population at Hull University)
relies almost exclusively on four-letter words, as if to reclaim what the conspicuously irritable poet had stolen, and to remind him that such words are
not in fact his own. The act of swearing is the criticism, and, like literature
itself, possesses an organising power in terms of social identity. Larkins own
swearing therefore becomes a paradox, both resisting and drawing heightened attention to constructed dualities: he breaks the rules regarding what
can be said, but in a context that ultimately distances him from the utterance itself.
For all its formal properties, poetry may be dened as an artfully constructed, isolating context for the spoken language a rhetorical frame
(created, among other things, by the formal properties of the poem, such as
line breaks; the acknowledged status of a specialised language user, i.e. the
artist-poet; and the trusted authority of the printed medium) where language (on a scale higher, I believe, than other written forms) appears to be
privately rather than socially authored, autonomous rather than interconnected, static rather than dynamic, and unidirectional rather than multidirectional. Like a physical work of art within a museum, the context shapes
the meaning. In the special case of Larkins f-word which threatens the
poems autonomy the meaning moves beyond the words denotations
to the rhetorical and context-based meanings of Larkin said fuck
(or Larkin tried to say fuck) and, in turn, poetry said fuck. Larkins
swearing incites a tension between poetrys centripetal forces (its attempted
10

Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York 1979) pp. 823.

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There was no possibility in the late 1970s of enlisting working-class

support around the cheery imperatives of reconstruction: grin and
bear it, wait and see, etc. The widespread disillusionment amongst
working-class people with the Labour Party and Parliamentary politics
in general, the decline of the Welfare State, the faltering economy, the
continuing scarcity of jobs and adequate housing, the loss of community, the failure of consumerism to satisfy real needs, and the perennial
round of industrial disputes, shutdowns and picket line clashes, all
served to create a sense of diminishing returns which stood in stark contrast to the embattled optimism of the earlier period.10

L A R K I N A N D F O U R - L E T T E R WO R D S

123

claim on the word), and the deconstructing forces of the swear words
social implications. The porous boundary between legitimate and co-opted
speech calls unwelcome attention to poetry in general as a specialised form
of ventriloquism an anxiety-producing notion rooted, I believe, in the
effort to order and naturalize the messiness of the contemporary political
scene, and that sometimes leaves Larkin cursing his own compositions in
the margins of his draft notebooks.11 Even within the controlled space of his
own poems, it seems, Larkins lift vandal skulks about.

Swear words, in all sorts of colourful variations, leap like migrating salmon
from Larkins letters especially those directed to Amis and other Oxford
cronies. In his poems, however, they appear only sporadically, and in rather
isolated contexts. Of Larkins four major collections The North Ship, The
Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows only eleven poems
contain swear words, with the word fuck, in varied conjugation, occurring
a total of three times (twice in This Be the Verse, once in High Windows).
And yet Larkins reputation and popular identity are inextricably tied to his
swearing. No doubt the publication of his correspondence did much to
secure his notoriety as a potty-mouth: in 1993, Peter Ackroyd branded him
a foul-mouthed bigot,12 while Ian Hamilton lamented that Larkinesque
now signied four-letter words and hateful views.13 Larkins identity as
swearer, however, also remains rmly rooted in his poetry. Seeking poetrys
most frequently quoted lines, Guardian editor Claire Armitstead rst names
Larkins They fuck you up your mum and dad as an ofce favourite,14 and
psychoanalyst Henry Seiden calls This Be the Verse one of the most
quoted of contemporary poems.15 Stephen Burt, in his analysis of High
Windows, refers to Larkin nonchalantly as the fuck-poet.16 Larkins two
fuck poems constitute a central part of his academic legacy as well (the
11

Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writers Life, p. 355.

Peter Ackroyd, Poet Hands on Misery to Man, Times, 1 Apr. 1993, p. 35.
13
Ian Hamilton, Self s the Man, Times Literary Supplement, 2 Apr. 1993, p. 3.
14
Claire Armitstead, What Are Your Most Quoted Lines of Poetry?, Guardian,
18 Jan. 2012, accessed 6 Mar. 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/books/
booksblog/2012/jan/18/most-quoted-lines-poetry.
15
Henry Seiden. They Fuck You Up: Philip Larkins This Be the Verse,
International Psychoanalysis, accessed 6 Mar. 2013. http://internationalpsychoanalysis.
net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/seidentheyfuckyouup.pdf.
16
Stephen Burt. High Windows and Four-Letter Words: A Note on Philip
Larkin, Boston Review, 21 May 1996, accessed 6 Mar. 2013. http://new.bostonreview.
net/BR21.5/burt.html.
12

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***

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17
18
19
20

Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writers Life, p. 446.

Ibid., p. 436.
Ibid., p. 444.
Sandie Byrne, H, V., and O: The Poetry of Tony Harrison (Manchester 1998) p. 90.

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word fuck is canonical now, Burt declares) representing his work in

Oxfords Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, as well as
Nortons Anthology of Modern Poetry and Anthology of English Literature.
Longmans Anthology of British Literature, while slyly forgoing This Be the
Verse, retains High Windows among its four Larkin selections.
Seemingly in place for shock value, Larkins f-bombs (unlike certain comments within his letters) never really provoked scandal, and may have even
propelled him to the Laureate position he declined in 1984. High Windows,
Motion explains in his biography, turned [Larkin] into a national monument.17 Even when High Windows rst appeared in 1974 fourteen years
after Penguin was tried for publishing Lady Chatterleys Lover audiences took
little to no issue with the new development in the poets lexicon. Rather, the
collection served to solidify Larkins image as the countrys beloved misanthrope. And while publisher Robert Giroux raised concerns about the
American accent and potential anti-Semitic references in Posterity, he
voiced no objections to Larkins use of obscenities.18 We live in an odd era,
Larkin himself told John Sparrow, warden of All Souls College, who had
denounced Penguins acquittal in the Chatterley case, when shocking language can be used yet still shocks it wont last.19 Indeed, Larkin seems to
have found an accommodating window for blurting obscenities, as thirteen
years later controversy would surround the televised performance of Tony
Harrisons curse-packed v. a poem described in one Times letter as an
embodiment of indecency, and, in the Independent, as the appropriation of art
by the riff-raff .20 By contrast, Larkins scandal-to-fame ratio seems conspicuously out of proportion.
Swear words remain a newsworthy issue in Britain, where, despite their
ubiquity, they continue to function as political fodder. The Public Order
Act of 1986 made swearing, if uttered within the hearing or sight of a
person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress, a potentially criminal offence. The Act also makes an interesting, if barely intelligible, distinction between private and public swearing: An offence may be
committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other
visible representation is distributed or displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the other person is also inside that or another dwelling. Domestic
swearing, Im guessing this means, is safe from the law, whereas street swear-

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125

21
Jon Kelly, Should Swearing Be Against the Law?, BBC News Magazine, 21 Nov.
2011, accessed 6 Mar. 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15816761.
22
Karla Adam, Britains Seem to Have More Tolerance for Salty Language,
Washington Post, 6 Aug. 2009), accessed 6 Mar. 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.
com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/05/AR2009080503653.html.
23
David Woodcock, British Prime Minister David Cameron Denies Swearing in
the House of Commons, Independent, 30 Jan. 2013, accessed 6 Mar. 2013. http://
www.independent.ie/world-news/british-prime-minister-david-cameron-deniesswearing-in-the-house-of-commons-29024956.html.
24
Jesse Sheidlower, The F Word (Oxford 2009) p. xxxiv.

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ing is not. In 2011, however, a judge upheld the appeal of a defendant who
was convicted for repeatedly using an expletive while being searched by
police on the grounds that the ofcers had heard the term too often to be
genuinely offended a decision that prompted, in turn, a renewed effort led
by London mayor Boris Johnson to legally punish those who swear at
police.21
Clearly, swear words continue to play an important, sometimes strategic,
role in the making and breaking of reputations. Even while proposing that
Britain is more immune to swearing than America, Washington Post reporter
Karla Adam acknowledges that rude words in the wrong context can sting
[in Britain] as much as anywhere. Mitchell, for example, was pressured to
resign in October 2012, and in 2008 on-air swearing cost Russell Brand his
position as radio presenter. Prime Minister David Cameron, Adam suggests,
may have actually beneted from publicly using the word twat in 2009,22
though the prime minister once again came under re for possibly having
sworn during a House of Commons session.23 For politicians especially,
swear words can have the effect of blowing ones cover, suggesting hypocrisy, or else demonstrating a lack of composure. Swearing in and of itself
may be acceptable at times evidence of ones grit or humanity but exhibitions of public restraint remain highly valued as well.
So what accounts for the vast, and relatively positive, mileage Larkin
gains from a handful of swear words? One answer has to do with his selectivity in swearing, and its connection to the persona he fashioned; when the
blatant obscenities of High Windows nally appeared, they had the effect of
something long stied, though hinted at, being released a sense of the
guarded, private self nally venting to the public. This effect was probably
intensied by the historical moment, when the politer f-word expression,
along with similar euphemisms, was being used more frequently.24 The evolution of Larkins expletives can be traced from an old-school damn in The
North Ship (XX); to a gureheads golden tits (Next, Please) and take that
you bastard (Poetry of Departures) in The Less Deceived; to The Whitsun
Weddings cock and balls (Sunny Prestatyn) and declaration of books as

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Alan Bennett, Alas! Deceived, in Regan (ed.), Philip Larkin, p. 235.

Kristy Beers Fgersten, Whos Swearing Now? The Social Aspects of Conversational
Swearing (Newcastle upon Tyne 2012) p. 103.
27
Regan, introduction to id. (ed.), Philip Larkin, p. 2.
28
In his Esquire review of Larkins Collected Poems.
29
Anne Fine, Philip Larkin: A Personal View, in About Larkin (No. 18, 2004), p. 13.
25
26

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crap (A Study of Reading Habits); to, nally, the blatant fucks of High
Windows. The sudden baring of what had previously festered below the
surface invited approval; as Alan Bennett puts it, Larkins ordinary voice
made him someone to like, to take to whose voice echoed ones inner
thoughts a shared secret.25 Quoting G. A. Fine, sociolinguist Kristy Beers
Fgersten explains that the offensiveness of swearing is blunted when accompanied by humour, a combination which can foster a bonding experience
between those who have eaten of the forbidden fruit.26 Furthermore,
Larkins regular dealing in generic plurals Humans, caught | On ground
curiously neutral (The Building) and wistfulness towards a changing
England And that will be England gone (Going, Going) made him
something of a national spokesperson, establishing in his quest for communal
truths a comforting connection between the private self and the public
citizen. Poems like Church Going, The Building, The Whitsun Weddings,
and Ambulances move from a meandering catalogue of personal experience
or observation to more podium-like certainties: A serious house on serious
earth it is, the poet concludes of his empty church building, In whose blent
air all our compulsions meet, | Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
Made famous by The Whitsun Weddings, Larkin had already secured, when
High Windows emerged, a position as the representative spokesman of respectable, mainstream English culture.27 Larkins fuck, then, is heavy with
ethos, as if the poet is staking claim to new ground for his established followers. This may explain not only subsequent swearing by poets like
Harrison and Carol Ann Duffy, but the echo effect produced in critics like
Torday, who sees Larkin as representative of ones inner asshole,28 and
Anne Fine, who bluntly describes the poet as a walking bullshit-detector.29
From this perspective Larkins fuck is very much our fuck a representative utterance to be cheered for, assumed as an expression of ones own discontent, or even (with the poets sanction) duplicated.
A second answer has to do with the context of poetry itself a medium
that both amplies and buffers Larkins verbal transgressions. Fiction, we
know from Lawrence, could not say fuck. Television, Harrisons case shows
us, couldnt say it either. But poetry, at least in the case of High Windows,
appears to have pulled it off. As a rhetorically distancing medium one
that divides author from speaker, delivering its language as if in quotation

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127

30

Andrew Swarbrick, Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin (New York 1995).
Gillian Steinberg, Philip Larkin and His Audiences (Basingstoke 2010).
32
John Carey, The Two Philip Larkins, in James Booth (ed.), New Larkins for Old
(New York 2000) pp. 5165.
33
Ian Hamilton, Four Conversations: Philip Larkin, London Magazine, 4 Aug.
1964, p. 73.
34
Barbara Everett, Philip Larkin: After Symbolism, in Regan (ed.), Philip Larkin,
pp. 5570. Motion, Philip Larkin and Symbolism.
35
John Osborne, Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in the Poetry of Philip
Larkin, in Booth (ed.), New Larkins for Old, pp. 14465.
36
B. J. Leggett, Larkins Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, and Poetry (Baton Rouge 1999);
Rossen, Philip Larkin: His Lifes Work, pp. 94130.
31

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marks the poem puts the swear word on display as much as it simply uses
the word in a functional sense. The effect is intensied by Larkins tendency
to splice together diverse idioms, making each feel, on close examination, less
than natural, and creating a sense of not one but multiple Larkins. Thus
Andrew Swarbrick devotes one chapter of his book to Larkins Identities,30
Gillian Steinberg names one of her chapters Larkins Voices,31 John Carey
writes of The Two Philip Larkins,32 and James Booth entitles his edited collection New Larkins for Old. Various critics have unearthed from Larkins selfproclaimed insular writing practices33 inuences ranging from symbolism34
to postmodernism35 to jazz.36
In a sense, poetry unspeaks the language it displays; poetic language, to
borrow Larkins phrase, is language caught on ground curiously neutral. In
this way social conict may be neutralised, diminished, or at least altered in
terms of its signicance. Larkins swear words go hand in hand with generational conict, as if the poets simultaneously disapproving and envious gaze
on English youth produces, on a nearly guttural level, the obscene utterance.
In Sunny Prestatyn, where the discourses of tourism (Come To Sunny
Prestatyn), vandalism, and, eventually, cancer awareness compete on a city
wall, it is a vandals additions of huge tits and a tuberous cock and balls to
a young models image that enables the speakers use of profanity. The f-word
itself appears exclusively in poems about generational differences; only when
acutely conscious of younger people does Larkin resort to it. Furthermore,
both This Be the Verse and High Windows use the f-word distinctly as a
point of departure, the former launching each of its rst two stanzas with the
obscenity before delivering a swear-free conclusion, and the latter using the
word in only the second of its twenty lines. The trajectory consistent with
the many Larkin poems (Church Going, Mr Bleaney, Faith Healing, etc.)
that end somewhere idiomatically distinct from where they began suggests
that the swear word cannot in good conscience, or in good taste, be sustained.
Paradoxically, such swearing nears what sociolinguists refer to as phatic

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37
Brna Murphy, Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Age and Gender in Female Talk
(Philadelphia 2010) pp. 1712.
38
Fgersten, Whos Swearing Now?, p. 99.
39
Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John
Thompson (Cambridge 1991) p. 8.
40
Hebdige, Subculture, p. 3.

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speech which, even in the form of taboo expressions, has politeness at its
center, usually occurs at the beginning or end of a conversation, and serves
to strengthen the speakerlistener connection.37 If Larkin at rst enlivens his
verse through a kind of discourse dipping, he does his potentially shocked
readers the service of returning to a more conventionally poetic language,
thereby positioning himself not as a swearer, but as one who swore.
This Be the Verse gallops from the outset in a jingly tetrameter, delivering three tidy quatrains in an ABAB rhyme scheme that seems to cry out
light verse. The surprising informality of the opening remark, and the concluding advice to Get out as early as you can, | And dont have any kids
yourself , create an avuncular position for the speaker, who employs a blatantly non-parental language to connect with and advise his (imagined)
youthful audience. Indeed, I can say from experience that This Be the
Verse is a uniquely teachable poem: accustomed to the alienating effects
of poetic language, students tend to receive Larkins profanity as an unexpected pleasure. In such a case, the poem presents itself as the language of
its readers rather than as something distinctly and irrefutably not theirs, and
pleasure results from the perceived relaxation of pretence. The use of fuck
as part of a familiar expression fucked up emphasises its shared use,
and somewhat absolves the speaker from personal ownership. Swearing, research shows, increases proportionally to intimacy within the speaker
listener relationship,38 making Larkins f-word a momentary suggestion of
common ground. As with a well-intentioned uncle, though, such strategies
may invite resistance: linguistic efcacy, John Thompson explains in his
introduction to Pierre Bourdieu, requires that Those who speak are
entitled to speak in the circumstances, and that those who listen reckon
that those who speak are worthy of attention.39 Readers who identify in opposition to Larkin or his values may reject his attempt to borrow what they
feel is exclusively theirs, especially if the appropriated speech occurs within
a suspiciously unfamiliar context. Even a single adjective like tuberous, as
seen in Sunny Prestatyn, distinguishes Larkins profanity from the purely
generic reference, betraying an outsider relationship with the indecent expression itself. If grafti are, as Norman Mailer denes them, Your presence on their Presence hanging your alias on their scene,40 then Larkin
performs a reversed, poetic grafto on the images he observes.

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Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
One the one hand, Larkin offers a spiteful response to Stevensons contented
stoicism. On the other, he ts his poem safely within the literary tradition, continuing not only his sources use of the quatrain and lyrical tetrameter, but the
positioning of individual suffering within a universal and cyclical context.
Larkin moves very neatly from stanza to stanza, rst acknowledging the
damage inicted on the present eras youth by their parents; then arguing that
those parents, as children, were similarly fucked up; and, nally, panning
outward to show in the concentrated image of a coastal shelf suffering as
part of a continuously inherited dynamic. John Carey describes the change in
Larkins language as that from the vulgar to the bardic and to the educated.41 Only here does Larkin disturb, with the spondaic foot Man hands,
the poems brisk iambic metre. Here, too, is the poems only metaphor, a transition from colloquial to aphoristic language, and a diversion from secondperson informalities in favour of third-person universals. This, for many
readers, is the heart of the poem, and a place where Larkins contemporarysounding f-word is drained of its contemporary signicance, reducing the nal
two lines in which the introductory tone and rhythm are resumed to insincere banter. The youth addressed in the poem, then, are not so much being
written to as written about: producers within [the literary eld], Bourdieu
41

Carey, The Two Philip Larkins, pp. 512.

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This Be the Verses unforgettable rst line has relegated the poems
quirky title to obscurity. Taken from Robert Louis Stevensons Requiem, the
title juxtaposes harshly with the lines that follow it, and presents an allusion
unavailable to young readers. The title even seems to play on this knowledge
gap, turning Stevensons archaically formal use of be into a comically ungrammatical declaration of the present poems nality. For readers familiar
with Stevenson an author whose status was greatly diminished by the time
Larkin referenced him the title somewhat offsets the poems crassness and
even its cynicism. Stevensons poem, a sombre but heroic acceptance of
anticipated death, provides his survivors with burial instructions:

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In times when nothing stood

but worsened, or grew strange,
there was one constant good:
she did not change.
42

Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, p. 57.

Philip Larkin, Required Writing (Ann Arbor 1999) p. 82.
44
Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writers Life, p. 440.
45
David Huxley, Ever get the feeling youve been cheated?: Anarchy and
Control in The Great Rock n Roll Swindle, in Roger Sabin (ed.), Punk Rock: So What?
The Cultural Legacy of Punk (New York 1999) p. 95.
43

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explains, produce rst and foremost for other producers42 an audience distinction Larkin acknowledges in The Pleasure Principle, where he separates
a genuine readership from the dutiful mob that signs on every September.43
While offering one audience a deant jab at traditional values, This Be the
Verse delivers for another a victorious disarming of youthful rebellion.
High Windows, Larkins last hurrah, emerged simultaneously with Britains
punk movement, the visual iconography for which was well under way as
Larkin composed the poems in his Hull at, moving at last to a house John
Kenyon describes as an exclusive, rather posh, entirely middle-class backwater with no loblolly men scavenging its litter baskets.44 Swear words were
becoming important for more than Larkin, who in Annus Mirabilis regrets
being too old for Beatle-induced sexual freedom, and who turned his attention instead to the jazz records he reviewed between 1961 and 1971. No
doubt Hulls Hermit would have felt even more estranged from the protopunk theatrics of artists like Iggy Pop and David Bowie. When punk materialised as a genuine aesthetic movement in 1975, decades before the internet
would provide an uncensored platform for insurgent youth, swearing was a
key marker of anti-establishment politics. Get pissed, Johnny Rotten ordered
listeners in Anarchy in the U.K. a curious companion to Larkins Get
stewed in A Study of Reading Habits as the Clash offered a disillusioned
fuck em in Jail Guitar Doors. In a famously ugly television interview in
1976, the Sex Pistols, baited by drunken host Bill Grundy, set the nation on
edge with a string of obscenities, prompting headlines like the Daily Mirrors
The Filth and the Fury and leading to a string of cancelled concerts on the
groups upcoming tour. One outraged member of the Greater London
Council, Bernard Brooke Partridge, commented that these groups would be
vastly improved by sudden death, naming the Sex Pistols in particular as the
antithesis of humankind.45
Amidst this anxious political scene a culmination of the economic recession that followed the 1960s promise of a better life Larkin penned his
quatrain for the Queens 1978 Jubilee:

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131

When I see a couple of kids

And guess hes fucking her and shes
taking pills or wearing a diaphragm
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives
Here Larkin willingly assumes the position of the dirty old man, voyeuristically speculating on a young couples sex life. Not unlike the touristy
Prestatyn poster, or the schoolgirls in Larkins now-published erotica (Trouble
at Willow Gables and Other Fictions), the young couple become the vandalised
objects of the speakers imagination. As Steve Clark puts it, the poem offers
a rather churlish and ungenerous presentation of everyone young on its
way to ecstatic nullity.48 Unlike the chummy fucks of This Be the Verse,

46

Regan, Introduction to id. (ed.), Philip Larkin, p. 19.

The Filth and the Fury, dir. Julian Temple (Film4 2000).
48
Steve Clark, The Lost Displays: Larkin and Empire, in Booth (ed.), New
Larkins for Old, p. 99.
47

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Noting the poems coincidence with the Sex Pistols acerbic God Save the
Queen, Stephen Regan recognises a mutual sense of lost value and a perception of national decline.46 Larkin, who had ridden a few choice words
to the pinnacle of poetic recognition, had seen the language surface publicly as an expression of nihilistic anger and social irreverence. In the
Grundy/Sex Pistols episode, swear words occur as isolated signiers of
disrespect, largely removed from their literal meanings: Shit, Rotten
enunciates plainly for his inquisitive host, looking something of the
scolded pupil after Grundy insists that he repeat what he had previously
muttered.47 Keep going, Grundy says shortly thereafter, say something
outrageous an invitation guitarist Steve Jones promptly takes him up on,
calling his host a dirty bastard, dirty fucker, and a fucking rotter
(Grundy had suggestively told a groupie standing behind the band that
they would meet afterward) as the segment comes to an end. It is fair to
say that angry youth won this public battle with suit-and-tie authority;
Grundy may have thought he was exposing the bands outrageousness as
a childish pretence, but it was his career that dried up as the Sex Pistols
accrued valuable notoriety.
It was Philip Larkin, however, not a punk band, who rmly restored the
f-word to its literal use, referring candidly to the act of sex in High
Windows:

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49

The Filth and the Fury.

Kristy Beers Fgersten. A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Swearword Offensiveness,
Saarland Working Papers in Linguistics (2007), p. 32.
51
Swarbrick, Out of Reach, p. 135.
52
Richard Bradford, First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin (Chester
Springs 2005) p. 211.
50

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Larkins swearing in High Windows, couched in an uncharacteristically

non-metrical, plain-sounding language, feels personal and aggressive. The
word fuck, in this case, serves as a symbolic displacement of what the
young male presumably does to his companion. This illicit fantasy is an extension of Larkins literature-induced imaginings as described in A Study of
Reading Habits The women I clubbed with sex! | I broke them up like
meringues as well as the sexual exclusion felt in Annus Mirabilis: Sexual
intercourse began | In nineteen sixty-three | (Which was rather late for
me). Not unlike Grundy and the coy groupie (future pop star Siouxsie
Sioux, in fact) whose loyalties he attempts to divert from the young male
band when he asks Are you worried or are you just enjoying yourself ?,49
Larkin nds himself desiring women who are too young, but also at complete odds with his own values; in a four-line poem called Administration,
he gripes that the girls you have to tell to pull their socks up | Are those
whose pants youd most like to pull down. The position of disciplinarian or
parental authority produces both resentment and desire, and a sense of
horning in theyre as drunk as I am, Grundy announces in his introductory remarks clings to the more sanctioned air of reproach. Rejection by
the younger generation potentially abandons the older male to the humiliating role of wanker a role Larkin concedes in Love Again, after determining that Someone else must be feeling her breasts and cunt. If white
males are, as research indicates, less restricted by rules of linguistic behavior, then profanity can serve as a means to reclaiming or demonstrating
ones social dominance.50
Even within the context of lascivious jealousy, however, Larkin manages
to reduce the fruits of sexual liberation sexual pleasure with less fear of
disease and unwanted pregnancy to a perfunctory routine, the couples
age-exclusive freedoms to a seductive illusion.51 Larkins f-word accompanies his sense of loss; as Richard Bradford states, the inherent tensions
between public morality and private inclination, lecherous predilection
and conformity, libidinous excess and monogamy had been what made
sex interesting. Now, apparently, little is forbidden and all can be said.52
The word fucking fulls the anti-Romantic task of making things ugly,
and Larkins description sounds more like an exodus than an introduction
to paradise a place dangled abstractly between stanzas before giving

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133

way to the concrete metaphors and circumspect, dreamy idealism of lines

69:
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly.

Burt, High Windows and Four-Letter Words.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed.
Randal Johnson Columbia: Columbia UP, 1993. p. 5.
53
54

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If Larkin began by appropriating the linguistic capital of the young people

he observes by seizing the unsophisticated but potentially powerful language that signies the young generations otherness he swiftly retreats
into something more recognisably poetic, establishing an immense divide
between the young and Everyone old. As Burt describes it, the speaker
moves into, and then out from under, [the younger generations] language.53 The word fuck is quickly subsumed by a recognisably literary
language belonging exclusively to those of Larkins habitus, a term dened
by Randal Johnson as a feel for the game, or set of dispositions resulting
from a long process of inculcation, and that generates practices and perceptions.54 Larkins habitus results, among other things, from his middleclass Coventry upbringing, Oxford education, and the sophisticated use of
language his craft demands things placing the unofcial Laureate starkly
at odds with certain demographics.
At rst, Larkin enviously suggests that the young are experiencing in
reality what the previous generation experiences as fantasy, using the image
of an outdated combine harvester to represent the bonds and gestures
that the young have disposed with. One can see couched in the jealousy,
however, Larkins nostalgia for what has been lost; bonds can refer to
meaningful and lasting (if potentially oppressive) human connections, and
gestures brings with it connotations of old-world honour and dignity.
There is sadness, and not just celebration, in the image of the junked harvester an emblem of British ingenuity that is now being pushed to the periphery by an encroaching set of values. Furthermore, the image of a long
slide is one of descent rather than ascent; the spiritual haven once promised
as a reward for good behaviour is replaced by an amoral, if pleasure-lled,
fall from grace.

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The poem then settles into the tracks laid by This Be the Verse, moving
backwards in a comparison of generations, and thereby placing the initial
language and imagery within a broader context:

Larkins use of italics for a previous generations voice calls attention to his
initial comments, too, as the language of a particular time, place, and generation. The mirrored content, however, in which freedom from religious
guilt replaces freedom from sexual guilt, and bloody replaces fucking,
showcases the differing languages as evolving expressions of the same timeresistant emotional conicts. Swearing in the context of present-day
England, then, is subsumed by naturally recurring, Oedipal patterns of generation conict. While a sense of loss namely that of Englishness as represented by the colloquial phrases and that and his lot, as well as the
distinctly British bloody becomes observable in the contrast between past
and present, the slide image remains xed as a representation of the unchanging human condition.
Larkin then moves for a second time from speech-oriented discourse to a
more formal and traditionally poetic language:
And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

This pensive, somewhat cryptic conclusion is one of several places in which

Larkin reaches for something beyond language. But why put it into
words?, he asks in Love Again, locating his sexual failures nally in a
vague prehistory of violence and wrong rewards, belonging less to the
present age than to arrogant eternity. In Here, the speaker takes us

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I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, Thatll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds.

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135

***
For all his documented fear of death, fear of youth affords Larkin an equally
productive muse. Larkins swearing, I believe, is a response to that fear, as
well as part of a larger discourse in which post-war political conict is dramatised as a battle of generations. Rock music asked the younger generations to see themselves in opposition to the older, who in turn fretted over a
highly commercialised wave of inferior culture. But while youthful anger
had available, and sometimes quite effective, means of expression, the
responding adult anger towards rebellious youth was inhibited by a longcultivated tradition of restraint. The resulting tension nonetheless became
visible during isolated moments moments in which the public was treated
55

Steinberg, Philip Larkin and His Audiences , p. 125.

James Baldwin, If Black English Isnt a Language, Then Tell Me What Is?, in
Donald Hall (ed.), The Contemporary Essay (Boston 1995) p. 41.
56

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beyond a seaside town to unfenced existence: | Facing the sun, untalkative,

out of reach, and The Whitsun Weddings train ride ends not with a visible
destination but the transformative image of an arrow-shower | Sent out of
sight, somewhere becoming rain. There is in such moments a safe sense of
retreat a movement away from specic and social realities and from
position-revealing language itself as well as a disconcerting awareness of
the unknown. In the case of Here, there is a hollowing out, a rhetorical
purging of the listed particulars that clutter the rst three stanzas. In The
Whitsun Weddings, the imagined change happens beyond the speaker,
who must presumably re-enter the social world he has delineated so neatly
from his train window.
Similarly, the ending of High Windows eradicates what has come
before, while also lamenting what remains unattainable. The language
offers a cryptic blend of concrete and abstract imagery, but one can observe
in its upward and outward movement a clear contrast to the long slide of
the previous stanzas. The suggestion of church windows, along with the adjective high, salvage from the poems voyeuristic beginning some sense of
the sacred and lofty. Noting Roger Days connection of High Windows to
Psalm 138, Steinberg argues that such moments are tinged with a kind of
religious appreciation.55 As in Church Going, where Larkin restores value
to the church even in the acknowledged absence of belief, the poem reasserts value in what he fears is being displaced; the aesthetic beauty of a clear
blue sky remains despite, and beyond, the contentious world where, as
James Baldwin puts it, to open your mouth is to put your business in the
street.56

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57

Hebdige, Subculture, p. 87.

LiquidLife TV, John Lydon on Jukebox Jury, online video clip, YouTube, 25
Mar. 2009, accessed 6 Mar. 2013.
59
Sdp026, John Lydon on the Tom Snyder Show 1980-Part 1, online video
clip, YouTube, 6 June 2007, accessed 6 Mar. 2013.
60
Order of Death, dir. Roberto Faenza (1983).
58

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to a showdown between irreverent youth and a challenged authority, such

as Grundys televised interaction with the Sex Pistols. Part of the punks
social performance was to publicly antagonise, to dramatise, as Dick
Hebdige explains, what had come to be called Britains decline by constructing a language which was, in contrast to the prevailing rhetoric of the
Rock Establishment, unmistakably relevant and down to earth.57
Repeatedly television hosts obliged them. When Johnny Rotten (hereafter
John Lydon) joined a panel of celebrity judges on televisions Juke Box Jury,
his determination to disrespect every sampled piece of music lured fellow
judge and radio personality Alan Freeman into the role of disrespected
senior. Battling Lydon for speaking time, Freeman draws approving laughter from the crowd when he at last tells his adversary to shut up.58 A few
seconds later, however, the crowd applauds vigorously as the former Sex
Pistol, ignoring Freemans imperative, raises his miss verdict on the song in
question. Even respected talk show host Tom Snyder struggles mightily to
keep his composure while interviewing an unruly Lydon in 1980.59 A 1983
lm known both as Order of Death and Copkiller cleverly exploits this dynamic,
casting Lydon as an eccentric young suspect who is imprisoned and tortured by a police ofcer ( played by Harvey Keitel) he has been stalking. The
Lydon character remains a thorn in Keitels side throughout the lm, tormenting him psychologically even as he masochistically endures the resulting physical abuse.60
The authority gure and his antagonistic punk, enclosed together in a
secret space, speaks to the fear present in Larkins poetry a fear that the
punk represents something in himself that he has dutifully, if guiltily, kept
hidden all these years, and a fear that his values are being sacriced to an
age of chaos and rebellion. Dont walk away from me when Im talking to
you its not nice, Keitels cop advises his private prisoner, before simply
playing out the cultural fantasy of beating him up. Beyond this space,
however (Keitel uses unlawful funds to maintain a secret apartment overlooking Central Park), he must don his public mask and perpetuate the discourse of law enforcement. Larkin, too, must wrestle with a conscious sense
of posturing and imitation, understanding even his own poetic development
(in his introduction to The North Ship) as a progression from a Yeastian voice

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137

61

61
62
63
64
65
66

Larkin, Required Writing, pp. 2930.

Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London 1992) p. 42.
Ibid., p. 122.
Ibid., p. 82.
Ibid., p. 31.
Hebdige, Subculture, pp. 889.

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to one inuenced by Hardy. Even the swearing in Larkins letters comes

across as highly performative, both in its exclusiveness to certain audiences
and in its hyperbolic presentation. Larkins swear words are typically isolated, often appearing in bunches as aggressive outbursts, as when he complains to Amis, I dont fuckin drink, I dont fuckin smoke I dont fuckin
fuck women I might as well be fuckin dead,62 or reects, writing to
J. B. Sutton, on H. G. Wellss death: He couldnt bastard write, he couldnt
bastard think, what he could bastard do was write bastard good scientic
bastard romances, the bastard.63 At other times Larkin emphasises his
swearing by using all caps, as when, in this instance, his typewriter is acting
up: When I have nished this page FUCK FUCK FUCK I will copy it
down BUGGER.64 As with his poetry, swearing appears as a momentary
transgression, used both as an expression of frustration and a strategy for
entertaining his reader.
Strangely, Larkin may have recognised what punks were expressing publicly in the 1970s as the discourse he and his Oxford cohorts had been exchanging privately since the 1940s. In a 1942 letter to J. B. Sutton, Larkin
sounds very much the belligerent youth as he details his morning: Having
washed up, made my bed &c. &c. and played a few records and bashed out
several choruses of blues like Joad playing his fucking Bach every morning
on the pianola.65 Given his tendency to xenophobia, and punks effort to
construct an alternative identity which communicated perceived difference:
an Otherness,66 the recognition would not have been a comfortable one.
Like a wave of socialism at mid-century Oxford, the politics of anarchy may
have been viewed, from Larkins perspective, as a fashionable pretence that
would, when convenient, be shed. The Sex Pistols share with Larkin a paranoia of phoniness, and a determined effort to achieve authenticity that the
stage simply does not allow. The resulting void may be lled with aggressive noise, sublime images of nothingness, or obscene language. Swear
words in particular offer a coercive medium: inherently combative, and
always socially charged, swearing can be aimed up at authority, or down at
ones perceived inferiors. Punks have historically sworn up at those representing the status quo, or at those who abuse positions of power. Though
Larkin may swear up at other poets, publishers, and certain political
gures, he swears down as head librarian, political conservative, and

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67

Hebdige, Subculture, p. 87.

Ibid.
69
Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, p. 45.
70
Tom Paulin, letter to Times Literary Supplement, 6 Nov. 1992, p. 15.
71
Marjorie Perloff, What to Make of a Diminished Thing, Parnassus 19/2 (1994)
p. 29.
68

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truth-seeking curmudgeon at uncultured youth and progressive politics.

From either direction, bad words put people in their respective places.
Describing the punks visual performance as degenerates, Hebdige attributes the success of the punk subculture as spectacle to the movements
construction of a language which was generally available a language
which was current.67 Larkin, too, seems to have successfully used degenerate language in a way that represented the atrophied condition of Great
Britain and symptomatize[d] a whole cluster of contemporary problems.68 But Larkin had positioned himself too rmly, in his poetry and
elsewhere, as hostile to change and as a representative of the state to swear
up effectively; rather, he absorbs the crude utterance into what Bourdieu
calls the ofcial language a language [ produced] by authors who have
the authority to write, xed and codied by grammarians and teachers who
are also charged with the task of inculcating its mastery, and that is ultimately bound up with the state.69 Although expressions of both oppression
and resistance become manifest in Larkins poems, his tendency to transform embattled, working-class language into universal axioms makes him
an obvious target for disenfranchised voices. While scholars have successfully combated those who would reduce Larkin to the sewer under the national monument,70 it would be remiss to extricate his poetic achievement from
the social problems embedded within it, or to grant him, as Marjorie Perloff
cautions us, too much authority as Englands representative.71 In Robert
Frosts ruminating syntax, something there is that doesnt like a Larkin,
something that doesnt easily nd its way into academic discourse that
may, in fact, resent nding itself represented there but that might be more
deeply engaged before it is scrubbed from the lift wall.