A review by hey_laura_mc
Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin by Alan Bennett

5.0

Full of delicious literary nuggets and surprises. I didn't think I liked Hardy but it turns out I do, sort of. Houseman was a bit of an odd one, and Betjeman's a little populist, but I found poetry I really liked by both - would like to try a version of Betjeman's NW5 and N6 as a writing exercise. As always, Bennett hits the nail on the head time and time again - Hardy's 'At Church' presents the vanity of the clergyman and the disillusionment of the young woman without any moral, just the poet "putting a frame around it"; Betjeman was "so English it was almost a joke"; MacNeice was "riven by doubt and duality" and wasn't "single-minded enough" to make a fool out of himself as other poets did (over boys, over Communism etc) and perhaps his poetry suffered a little as a result. I'd never read 'The Slow Starter' before and it's sublime - a testament to lost opportunities, the wish to be a little bolder, a little bit more forceful. But the best is saved till last: Larkin. Bennett has a word about narrative voice, which I liked for its pith ("The 'I' [in Larkin} is always the eye. It is not always I.") and will definitely use in class, I think, for easy explanation, but also appeals because Bennett's saying Larkin isn't necessarily who he's pretending to be in his verse (hence the bonfire of diaries after his death, eh?) Nevertheless, he's not a nice man (great anecdote about him saying to a Hull student caught at a bus stop in the rain with him "Don't think you're coming under my umbrella" and this being a metaphor for his art - resolutely refusing to console). Finally, Bennett's choice of Toads Revisited, Aubade and The Trees as the final poems to end the anthology is just PERFECT. Loved, loved, loved.