Philip Larkin and the Poetry of Otherness

From the archangel Gabriel, to those elusive muses that float atop Grecian mystic mountains in the paradise of Parnassus who sang their poetry into the keen ears of Homer; from Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses, to the anti-personal poetry of Eliot—sacred writing (and I am most certainly looking at poetry here) has always eschewed a concept of Self. Poetry has always hedged its bets on the idea of an Other. In the poetry of Philip Larkin, we may presume that with his descriptions of a very particular desolate Hull, and his humanist approach to life, he is a poet that writes very much from a viewpoint of the Self. If we look a little closer, however, we find this is not the case.
In Larkin’s discussion of his poem ‘Absences’ we witness a rare admittance from the poet himself on the matter of summoning the Other, in order to write what he, in characteristic pseudo-humility claims, is quite simply ‘better’ poetry:
I suppose I like ‘Absences’ (a) because of its subject matter—I am always thrilled by the thought of what places look like when I am not there; (b) because I fancy it sounds like a different, better poet rather than myself. The last line, for instance, sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French symbolist. I wish I could write like this more often.
This quote is of particular use to us, as it appears to resonate with a poetics of Otherness, in a Homeric sense of invoking a voice that is of a higher order: ‘I fancy it sounds like a different, better poet rather than myself.’ Furthermore, some sentiments seem to resonate with Eliot’s idea of a loss of the Self in order to represent things more perfectly: ‘I am always thrilled by the thought of what places look like when I am not there’. Finally, Larkin imagines the last line to read like an Other, in this case, a French symbolist. The last line that Larkin refers to, in ideology and in tone, reads like an Arthur Rimbaud in full swing, having fled Charleville, discovered absinthe and hashish with a green-eyed Paul Verlaine, and is now systematically deranging senses, in order to bring to the fore an objective truth:
Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.
Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!
What makes the construction of the poem so interesting is that, before the final image, in the first two stanzas of ‘Absences’, we are not in the Latin Quarter of a revolutionary Paris, but we instinctively feel isolated, in Larkin’s familiar post-war North England of ‘fishy smelling pastoral’. This is an English shore we are gazing at, that, ‘sighs’, moves like, ‘fast-running floors’, and whose waves drop ‘like a wall’. The voice is that of an urban city dweller, until we begin to derail, and, ‘sift away’ towards the end of the penultimate line, before dipping with immense disorientation in to an image that seems to accidentally channel the infinite, appearing to seamlessly, give forever:
Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!