Philip Larkin: Poet Extraordinaire

AN INNER STAGE

When my mother and father were first getting to know each other back in the early 1940s, Philip Larkin was publishing his first poems. In the early to mid-1950s when my mother investigated and then joined the Baha’i Faith in Canada, Larkin began to establish himself as one of the foremost figures in 20th century poetry. Of course, I was not interested in any of this, the Bahá’í Faith or poetry, still in my childhood as I was playing in the streets, watching my first TV programs and becoming increasingly aware, even then, of the beauty of the opposite sex.

By the time Larkin died in 1985 at the age of 63, he was still not on my radar screen. The serious study and writing of poetry had, by then, just begun. My mother had also, by then, died and I had taken up her interest in the Baha’i Faith. I was a pioneer for the Canadian Baha’i community and living in Katherine in Australia’s Northern Territory, working as a teacher, had three children and my nose was to the proverbial grindstone.

When I retired in 1999 after 50 years in classrooms as a student and a teacher, when my three children had left home and my wife and I had taken a sea-change in Tasmania, I got to be more acquainted with the poetry of Larkin. I had become a poet myself; my acquaintance with the Baha’i Faith by 2003 was in its 50th year and I had hundreds of thousands of readers on the internet. This prose-poem was written in my 65th year in appreciation for the poetry and life of a man whom I had just begun to get to know.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs: My Memoirs, 16 November 2008.

I, too, Philip, was had my deeply
melancholic and introverted times.
I, too, came to find words gave me
a sense of power and control of a
world from which I felt divorced
after half a century of intense and
gregarious engagement....Writing
became a psychological necessity
for me, too, Philip—a pleasurable
and often intolerable wrestle with
words, as Eliot had told us it was.

We both had a need for solitude, eh
Philip?----as far back as childhood.
And it had become an obsession in
the evening of our life, eh Philip?

Now that your dramatic life on that
inner stage is gone, Philip, some say
you were the greatest poet of your
generation who made others feel they
were poets, too, in the midst of their
ordinary, their commonplace, existence.

Ron Price
16 November 2008