by
Martin Amis
328
And say why it never worked for me…Invidia
0
terms
1
notes
338
To repeat: as a young man Larkin was intrigued, or better say fatally mesmerised, by the Yeatsian line about choosing between ‘perfection of the life’ and perfection ‘of the work’. But that was a line in a poem (‘The Choice’), not in a manifesto; no one was supposed to act on it (and Yeats certainly didn’t). Larkin seized on the either/or notion, I think, as a highminded clearance for simply not bothering with the life, and settling instead for an unalloyed devotion to solitude and self. As he put it in ‘Love’ (1966): ‘My life is for me. / As well ignore gravity.’ Most crucially, the quest for artistic perfection coincided with his transcendent worldly goal – that of staying single.
To repeat: as a young man Larkin was intrigued, or better say fatally mesmerised, by the Yeatsian line about choosing between ‘perfection of the life’ and perfection ‘of the work’. But that was a line in a poem (‘The Choice’), not in a manifesto; no one was supposed to act on it (and Yeats certainly didn’t). Larkin seized on the either/or notion, I think, as a highminded clearance for simply not bothering with the life, and settling instead for an unalloyed devotion to solitude and self. As he put it in ‘Love’ (1966): ‘My life is for me. / As well ignore gravity.’ Most crucially, the quest for artistic perfection coincided with his transcendent worldly goal – that of staying single.