Poetry Corner

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was reputedly a miserable, bad-tempered, unreasonable, anti-social, nasty bit of work. I liked him. Apart from writing poetry, for a number of years he also regularly wrote columns about jazz music for the Guardian and the Telegraph. Of course, he loved the original New Orleans jazz of Louis Armstrong and Joe King Oliver etc, and pretty well loathed all the modern bop and post-bop that he was employed to write about. He is probably best known for his poem 'This Be The Verse', which memorably begins "They f**k you up, your mum and dad They may not mean to, but they do" But today's poem in poetry corner is the almost as famous 'ANNUS MIRABILIS' (published 1974) Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) - Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles' first LP Up till then there'd only been A sort of bargaining, A wrangle for a ring, A shame that started at sixteen And spread to everything. Then all at once the quarrel sank: Everyone felt the same, And every life became A brilliant breaking of the bank, A quite unlosable game. So life was never better than In nineteen sixty-three (Though just too late for me) - Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles' first LP. NOTE from Editor - the asterisks in the anglo-saxon expletive above are mine. The word appears in full in Larkin's poem - but the nature of a weblog is such that you cannot be sure who might view it - thus I try to avoid swearing in full technicolour.