Posted by Reverie on December 07, 1996 at 20:26:14:
From cust122.max19.new-york.ny.ms.uu.net
The F-Word In High Society. All dressed up and invited to the party. Can a poet make art of obscene words? And what are the obscene words? Can modern poetry be controversial? ---From The Boston Review A Note on Philip Larkin The word 'fuck' is canonical now. The poem by Philip Larkin which most people find easiest to remember is the one that begins with a fine pun in it: 'They fuck you up. . .'1 The pun-that your parents both generate and ruin you-is fine, and it plays on one of the many special properties that 'fuck,' and some other dirty words, have: Their common figurative meanings have very remote relations to their literal meanings. Heterogeneous ideas are yoked together through the pun, just as heterogeneous expectations are yoked together through the violence with which the title and the first line hijack the words and meter of Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Requiem.'2 Copyright Boston Review, 1996.
High Windows and Four-Letter Words
When Philip Larkin published High Windows in 1974, what everyone noticed, besides its general excellence, was its profusion of foul language. Larkin himself told John Betjeman that 'whenever he looked at his book he found it was full of four-letter words.' It is, too. Among the poems in High Windows that make use of dirty words are the book's title poem, 'Vers de Société,' and the well-known 'This Be The Verse,' a twelve-line poem beginning: 'They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.' Robert Crawford described the impact that 'Larkin's English' had on English poetry:
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