Robert Browning is most often thought of as the Novelist's Poet - Hardy, being successfully both, somehow doesn't qualify - but Martin Amis makes a powerful - even moving - argument for Philip Larkin taking this role:
Particularly in his longer poems, which resemble Victorian narrative paintings, Larkin is a scene-setting phrasemaker of the first echelon. What novelist, reading ‘Show Saturday’, could fail to covet ‘mugfaced middleaged wives/Glaring at jellies’ and ‘husbands on leave from the garden/Watchful as weasels’ and ‘car-tuning curt-haired sons’? In ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ the fathers of the brides ‘had never known/Success so huge and wholly farcical’; in ‘To the Sea’, immersed in the ‘miniature gaiety’ of the English littoral, we hear ‘The distant bathers’ weak protesting trebles’ and ‘The small hushed waves’ repeated fresh collapse ... ‘
Many poems, many individual stanzas, read like distilled short stories, as if quickened by the pressure of a larger story, a larger life. The funny and terrrifying ‘Mr Bleaney’ (a 28-line poem about the veteran inhabitant of a bedsit) has the amplitude of a novella. And Larkin’s gift for encapsulation is phenomenal. Admire this evocation, in ‘Livings, III’, of the erudite triviality of high-table talk in, as it might be, All Souls, Oxford – and Larkin does it in rhyme:
Which advowson looks the fairest,
What the wood from Snape will fetch,
Names for pudendum mulieris,
Why is Judas like Jack Ketch?
‘Livings, I’ begins: ‘I deal with farmers, things like dips and feed.’ And after a single pentameter the reader is lucidly present in another life.
Larkin began his career as an exceptionally precocious writer of fiction: he had two pale, promising (and actually very constricted) novels behind him, Jill and A Girl in Winter, by the age of 25. Twenty-five, and two novels. The reason he gave for abandoning his third (to be called A New World Symphony) is, in my view, dumbfoundingly alien. Which brings us to the more fugitive and subliminal component of the fascination Larkin excites in all novelists and in all students of human nature. The poems are transparent (they need no mediation), yet they tantalise the reader with glimpses of an impenetrable self: so much yearning, so much debility; an eros that self-thwarts and self-finesses. This is what rivets us: the mystery story of Larkin’s soul.
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