Notes
Whoever becomes Poet Laureate should surely be someone who can versify When the occasion demands. He need not be the greatest poet of the age (past
l-aureates seldom have been), but he should be capable of producing something decent at the drop of a coronet. The favourite for
the Post, Philip Larkin, is thought by some to he too gloomy and introverted, but there Is some little known evidence which sug- gests his competence. To a privately printed book, A Garland for the Laureate, which celebrated the 75th birthday of Sir John }3etleman, Mr Larkin contributed a poem called 'Bridge for the Living', the words of a cantata performed in the City Hall, Hull, In_ 1981 to mark the opening of the Humber Bridge. Here is one stanza:
The winds play on it like a harp; The song, Sharp from the east,
Sun-throated from the west,
Will never to a separate shire belong, But north and south make union manifest.
Not bad for a poem on the Humber Bridge, and not bad for a man who must feel no riatural sympathy for it at all. After that, a few lines on the Duke of Gloucester would be a piece of cake. But if, as is rumoured, Mr Larkin does not covet the post, why not 81veit to his old friend, Kingsley Amis? Mr Anus is devoted to comprehensible poetry, which he is now introducing to a huge Public in the Daily Mirror. He is the author Of some fine examples of it himself. He even wrote an ode for the coronation of the Present Queen which was never published and which, he says, is now lost. If he could manage such a production when he was an A, ngry Young Man how easily inspiration should come to him now that he is a Great Man of Letters.
Previous page
