ABSTRACT
The best insight in Maeve Brennan’s memoir of her time with Larkin is the conjecture that “perhaps love failed him because his ideals were so high: it never matched his expectations”. Larkin’s poems consistently reach out from a world that is too much with them, that threatens to define what they are and how they can be felt. Larkin may hide his commitment behind a mask of apathy, ignorance, and lower-bourgeois philistinism, but drops it often enough that the strength of his commitment is indeed visible. Larkin remains tempted by what he can never intellectually accept: although he claims to be put off by the “‘literary’ nature” of some passages in the Gospel of John, he finds himself stirred by several and, curiously, intrigued by the emphasis upon God the Father. Larkin’s temporary abandonment of “Church Going” reveals his sense of having reached an impasse regarding his rendition of the passage from concrete emplacement to liberating, rather abstract, ideality.
