Do poets need monuments? Not according to Horace, writing in the first century BC, who considered his poems to be “a monument more lasting than bronze/And loftier than the pyramids of kings”. Ben Jonson took a similar line when others were campaigning for Shakespeare to be given a place in Westminster Abbey: why bother? “Thou art a Moniment without a tombe” he wrote, “And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live.” Over the centuries, Poets’ Corner has become a national institution nonetheless. There’s no greater posthumous honour for a writer. And now Philip Larkin is taking his place there.
His memorial stone sits between those of Anthony Trollope and Ted Hughes, with the tomb of Chaucer behind. Would he have approved? Not every poet leaps at the chance to be commemorated. Alexander Pope wrote an epitaph for himself as “one who would not be buried in Westminster Abbey”, preferring a grave near his mother’s, in Twickenham.
Larkin, like Pope, set himself at a distance from metropolitan literary culture. But he cared about his reputation, accepting the various honours the establishment conferred on him and was anxious that ‘posterity’ would mean more than the dystopian, academic version offered by his imaginary American biographer, Jake Balokowksy. When he turned down the post of poet laureate, and it went to Ted Hughes, he joked in a letter to Kingsley Amis: “The thought of being the cause of Ted’s being buried in Westminster Abbey is hard to live with.” The tone is facetious; the regret that he might have missed out on a spot in the abbey is not.
It has taken him much longer than Hughes did to get there - 31 years rather than 13 – and longer than TS Eliot and WH Auden, who made it within a couple of years of their deaths. Still, Shakespeare, who died in 1616, wasn’t memorialised until 1740 (‘After an hundred and thirty years’ nap/Enter Shakespeare with a loud clap’ wrote Pope). Byron – mad, bad and dangerous to know – took even longer. When he died, in 1824, the dean of the abbey at the time, Dr Ireland, thought the best thing was “to carry away the body & say as little about it as possible”. But crowds thronged to his funeral procession, and supporters were soon pressing for his inclusion. He finally got there in 1969. But even that’s not the record for deferral: Christopher Marlowe, stabbed to death in 1593, had to wait until 2002.
Till recent times most of the monuments in Poets’ Corner were raised by private patronage rather than as state commemoration. Today the process for inclusion is at the discretion of the dean of Westminster, whose ear various pressure groups seek to bend. When Cecil Day-Lewis was denied a place in 2003, despite a petition led by his widow, Jill Balcon, and supported by (among others) Seamus Heaney, the brouhaha forced the dean to issue a press release: “There seems to be a view around that anyone who is poet laureate is automatically memorialised in the abbey,” it read. “That has not been the case.” Now that the laureateship has a fixed 10-year term, rather than expiring only when the poet does, it’ll be even less the case.
Most of the poets memorialised in the abbey are buried elsewhere. Chaucer, the first one there, is an exception. In his last years, the abbey may have offered him sanctuary from his debtors after he ran into financial troubles, as poets will. Thomas Hardy’s remains are also there, but not completely: he had asked to be buried near his Dorset home, but when the abbey authorities approached his widow she compromised, by keeping his heart and sending them his ashes. The attempted exhumation of Spenser’s tomb in 1938 was no less grisly. It was done at the bidding of the Bacon Society, who believed an elegy by Shakespeare might be inside and that the handwriting would prove that Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays. Sadly for them, they got the wrong grave.
Given this history – the manoeuvring, lobbying, rivalries and exhumations - the question of whether Larkin belongs in a place of worship seems beside the point. There was a time when, as Thomas A Prendegast notes in his book Poetical Dust, “the nature of the Corner changed, becoming not so much an index of the worth of poetry as a measure of whether the poet was worthy” – ethically, that is. It may be that Larkin’s alleged misogyny and racism have delayed his arrival. But they don’t infect the published poems, only the letters and squibs, and haven’t denied him a place.
His lack of religious faith isn’t an issue either. The enshrinement of Shelley, who wrote a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism, set a precedent after all. “There is No God”, he believed, though he didn’t rule out “a pervading Spirit co-eternal with the universe”.
Larkin didn’t quite rule it out either. He called his poem Church Going “entirely secular”. But it was prompted by an appeal he had seen from the Historical Churches Preservation Trust, and honours the church as a “serious house on serious earth” that exerts a powerful draw even on the unbelieving, “if only that so many dead lie round”. There’s also Water, a poem in which he imagines constructing a religion (“I should raise in the east/A glass of water/Where any-angled light/Would congregate endlessly”), as well as several other poems which shine with images of transcendent light.
In Aubade – the greatest poem in the language about the fear of death – Larkin describes religion as “a vast musical brocade created to pretend we never die”. But a residual Anglicanism did sometimes affect him, notably on the day after his mother died, when he invited Anthony Thwaite to join him for prayers at the chapel of All Souls College, Oxford, on the grounds that “Mother would have liked it”. But in the end, all that matters are the poems, and the esteem and affection in which they’re held. As the most quotable British poet of the 20th century, Larkin deserves his marmoreal afterlife. The lines Pope proposed be inscribed on the vacant scroll under Shakespeare’s bust say it perfectly: “Thus Britain lov’d me and preserv’d my Fame”.
