Di visione in visione Yeats Larkin e limmortalit

Di visione in visione: Yeats, Larkin e l’immortalità dell’arte Prof. Anna Enrichetta Soccio 2 maggio 2011

W. B. Yeats Philip Larkin

From The Times , January 5, 2008 The 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945 1. Philip Larkin 2. George Orwell 3. William Golding 4. Ted Hughes 5. Doris Lessing 6. J. R. R. Tolkien 7. V. S. Naipaul 8. Muriel Spark 9. Kingsley Amis 10. Angela Carter

Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, Larkin’s biographer and one of his literary executors, remarks: “Larkin’s poems are brilliantly good at capturing the big things in life — love and its failing, youth and its fading; age and then the only end of age — in language which is deeply familiar yet marvellously condensed and memorable. He always speaks from the heart to the heart. ” The deep familiarity seems, sometimes, shockingly offhand (famously, of course: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” [“This Be the Verse”]) and yet it is allied with a confident, metrical elegance that allows the work to exist in both the contemporary and the eternal world, a nearimpossible trick (Erica Wagner, The Times, 5 January 2005)

I dislike such things [modernist products] not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. (All What Jazz. A Record Diary 1961 -1971, p. 27).

The predominance of Yeats in this volume deserves some explanation […] I spent the next three years [1943 -1946] trying to write like Yeats, not because I liked his personality or understood his ideas but of infatuation with his music […] In fairness to myself it must be admitted that it is a particular potent music, pervasive like garlic, and has ruined many a better talent. (Required Writing. Miscellaneous Pieces 19551982, p. 29).

Ŏ ságěs stándĭng ĭn Gód’s hóly fíre Ăs ín thě góld mŏsáic óf ă wáll, Cóme frŏm thě hóly fíre, pérne ĭn ă gyre, Ănd bé thě síngĭng-mástěrs óf my sŏul (“Sailing to Byzantium”) Bŭt íf hě stóod ănd wátched thě frígĭd wínd Toúslĭng thě clóuds, láy ón thě fústy béd Téllĭng hĭmsélf thăt thís wăs hóme, ănd [grínned, Ănd shíverěd, wĭthoút shákĭng óff thě dréad (“Mr. Bleaney”).

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of [ flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Chicester Cathedral, West Sussex, U. K.

“Love isn’t stronger than death just because statues holds hands for 600 years” (cit. in A. Motion, Philip Larkin. A Writer’s Life, p. 274)

“I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. ” (“Statement”, in Required Writing. Miscellaneous Pieces 1955 -1982, p. 79).