T

.S. Eliot once voiced the opinion that the best poet to write in English in the last 200 years was W.B. Yeats. Although Old Possum was wrong about many things, I believe he was right about that. Which leads us to the follow-up question: Who is the best poet to write in our language since Yeats? We might have to answer that in two parts, depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean we’re talking about (two peoples separated by a common language and all that). In America, I’d say possibly James Wright, possibly W.S. Merwin, possibly Louise Glück. In the U.K., I think it’s either Ted Hughes or Philip Larkin, a pair of polar opposites. For my money, Hughes edges out Larkin, but there’s no denying the strength and durability of Larkin’s achievement.

As one of the primary apostles of formalism, he helped drag rhythm and rhyme kicking and screaming into the latter half of the twentieth century. The trick is always to fit ordinary speech comfortably within formal constraints, with thoughts, images and turns of phrase so arranged as to be meaningful and memorable. Easy peasey! Larkin is a poet of the everyday, seeking illumination in the quotidian. More often than not, he finds what he’s seeking. Many of his poems are now justly regarded as classics.

The poem we’re looking at today, “Annus Mirabilis,” was written in June 1967 and seven years later became part of the final volume published during his lifetime, High Windows (1974). In it he looks back nostalgically on the beginnings of the sexual revolution, only a few years old at the time of writing, but it must have seemed like centuries, so vast were the social and cultural changes the decade had wrought. How appropriate that this poem should be one of the first to mention the Beatles, seeing as they had led and come to symbolize those changes (Allen Ginsberg’s “Portland Coliseum” from 1965 mentions the group members by name but not the group itself).

I’m guessing it’s no accident that the manuscript bears a date of June 16, 1967, exactly three weeks after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. That the Beatles were doing work of lasting value had been apparent since at least 1965 to open-minded listeners from the worlds of jazz and classical music, including Miles Davis and Leonard Bernstein, among many others. However, Sgt. Pepper was the turning point that caused every culture critic to take them seriously. When Larkin wrote “Annus Mirabilis” he could feel confident that name-checking them would not make the poem seem hopelessly dated someday.

The poem is 20 lines long, consisting of four stanzas of five lines each, employing a rhyme scheme of ABBAB. The meter is mostly iambic, with plenty of exceptions. The first stanza neatly sets the scene:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The trial of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act for publishing the unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence resulted in a “not guilty” verdict on November 2, 1960. That the author’s worst book effectively rid Britain of literary censorship is about the only good thing one can say about it. Penguin should have been prosecuted for publishing a misshapen novel that managed to make sex both boring and mawkishly stupid. The Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, came out March 23, 1963. Between the two dates singled out by Larkin fell two other events worth noting in regard to the sexual revolution. On December 4, 1961, birth control pills became available through the National Health Service, though until 1967 they were only given to married women. And in the summer of 1963, the Profumo scandal broke open.

That’s the backdrop. The only use of first-person in the poem occurs in the parentheses in stanzas one and four, windows into Larkin’s own view of these events. Why, one wonders, does he feel that the sexual revolution was “rather late for me”? Because he turned 41 in 1963? Even before the advent of ED drugs, middle-aged people embraced the new sexual ethic as eagerly as the young. More so, perhaps, because they knew all too well what they had missed growing up.

That, in fact, is the subject of stanza two, where he recounts the old order, in which sex is “A sort of bargaining, / A wrangle for a ring, / A shame that started at sixteen / And spread to everything.” To sum up the institution of marriage as "A wrangle for a ring" is profoundly dismissive and reductionist. And yet, from the young man’s point of view, maybe not so far off. How insightful of Donald Davie to call him a poet of “lowered sights and diminished expectations.” Larkin went through a pronounced Auden-worshipping phase when he was learning how to write, and this stanza does display some of Auden’s genius for generalization.

Stanza three tells how things have been since the sexual revolution, which quickly produced “A brilliant breaking of the bank, / A quite unlosable game.” Happiness all around, it would seem. Yet stanza four concludes the tale almost exactly as it began, on a note of irony mixed with poignant regret:

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterly ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Treating the final stanza like the repetitive chorus of a pop song—shades of the Fab Four again—is a clever touch that drives home the underlying conflicted nature of the poem. If “life was never better,” why does he have to keep saying that? Is he consciously echoing the song “Getting Better” from Sgt. Pepper, with the chorus that undercuts its own ostensible message, “It’s getting better all the time (it can’t get no worse)”? Yes, I think so. And here is a good place to leave off our examination of the poem, at the point where Larkin demonstrates that the sexual revolution was part of a bigger cultural tsunami that changed much more than sex, among other things causing high art and pop art to mate, blend into each other and became all but indistinguishable.