ABSTRACT
Here’s another lively example of poets and psychoanalysts working the same dysfunctional family terrain. This Be The Verse They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself. Since the great contemporary English poet Philip Larkin (1922–1985) published “This be the verse” in 1971, it has gone on, for obvious reasons, to be one of the most quoted of contemporary poems—recitable in full by many who probably 76couldn’t name its author. Larkin, who in his lifetime gave the world a large body of memorable sardonic, seriously despairing, and anti-sentimental poems joked that he expected this one would be intoned at his funeral by a chorus of a thousand girl scouts.
