Ben Wolfson posted a reading of Larkin's "This Be The Verse," and it is recommended.
I don't know too much about 20th century British poetry, but I would venture that Larkin's poem on biology and heritability also considers traits inherited over the history of poetry, hence the thumping iambic tetrameter. (Rhythm was not avoided in his work, to be sure.)
Larkin's title brings to mind an antecedent poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, "Requiem":
UNDER the wide and starry skyRelevant for the incidental or coincidental line but also for the address to his heirs. Posted by Kriston at November 18, 2005 12:51 AM
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
Your comment calls to my mind Housman's memorial poem for Stevenson, "R.L.S.", which draws on the somewhat histrionic "Requiem" by drawing out its images into metaphors of artistic fecundity (alternating line indentation doesn't seem to come through):
Home is the sailor, home from sea:
Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
The plunder of the world.
Home is the hunter from the hill:
Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
And every fowl of air.
'Tis evening on the moorland free,
The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.
I don't know what, if anything, Larkin had to say about Stevenson, but he counted Housman among those who made a connection between poetry and the reading public, and so a predecessor of sorts. He also wrote a lovely short review of a biography of the scholar and poet, collected in Required Writing.
"Fuck you up" as begetting is mildly interesting, echoing as it does the Larkin's use of verbs with double meanings, as in "Lying in Bed" ("an emblem of two people being honest", and so on.)
Posted by: JL at November 18, 2005 6:12 AMOf course, I have my own opinions about "Requiem".
Posted by: ben wolfson at November 18, 2005 1:51 PM