Philip Larkin once wrote me a letter after I had contributed to a volume of essays celebrating his sixtieth birthday. I had praised aspects of his work but I knew he would pay more attention if there was a bit of edge in the encomium, so I ended up invoking the name of Dante. Mention of a big-league foreign bard would have to bring out the best in him.
Sure enough, in his note of thanks he put a typical Larkin spin on the thing. He was very glad, he said, that I had treated him as a "poet", and in the actual letter, he did put those inverted commas round the word. The noun was being hung out to dry. And so, to a certain extent, was I. There was the slightest suggestion that by upgrading him to first class, among poetry's equivalent of the CEOs, I had fallen for everything that Lucky Jim was against.
The part of Larkin that boxed the lugs of the poet with quotation marks was also the part that had written, in one of the poems, "Get stewed. Books are a load of crap." The part that had turned against Dylan Thomas and W.B. Yeats and Hugh MacDiarmid. The part that eventually embodied itself in an image of the English poet as mean sod, a grey-flannelled nerd in bicycle clips, culling the Irish coins from his pockets into the church collection box.
In one sense, of course, this was a matter of protective colouring. The Movement poets of the Fifties - especially those no-good boyos Amis and Larkin - were allergic to all forms of high cultural blather and swank and liked to masquerade as part of the usual flora and fauna. They would have run a mile rather than be seen colloguing with Dame Edith Sitwell, she of the wimple and rings.
A remark made years ago by one of my witty sisters-in-law about this same dame comes to mind here too. She could never tell, she claimed, the difference between Edith Sitwell and Archbishop Makarios. And her joke, I now realise, was yet another expression of the Fifties mood, an amusement that amounted to a questioning of the conflation of religious authority and poetic mystique, of the arrogation by the poet of representative status, be it national, political or prophetic.
Still, in my sister-in-law's remark there was also a certain lingering attachment to all that. Behind the joke, there was the deep anthropology. Edith might look like a stray from an Eistedfodd, but she was also a reminder of poetry as an aspect of the sacred. Of Yeats in his tower, Mandelstam in his banishment, Dickinson in her crystal crucible. Names like these remind us of poetry as a desperate necessity. Poetry as a mark in the consciousness of the species. Something that burns away the inverted commas.
Larkin, of course, was also susceptible to this high possibility of the art. The orchestration of his verse reveals an abiding "hunger to be more serious". He was unable to deny the oceanic surge - in the language and in himself. Deep down, he never abandoned a faith in the poem as something that renovates the reader's trust in the verity of his or her own individual being.
This is what poetry makes happen. Before it is co-opted into cultural debates or national questions or gender politics, it is - at its necessary best - an occasion of existential urgency. Even a poet who is routinely considered as an "issue based" writer - John Hewitt, for example, forever dogged by his definition of himself as "an Irishman of planter stock, by conviction a man of the left" - even such a one is more urgently the poet when what is at stake is the issue itself, when the logic of poetry comes into conflict with habits of conviction.
Which is why Hewitt's poem, "The King's Horses", has been on my mind over the past few weeks. In it, the poet awakes in a London hotel to the hypnotic sound of horses' hoofs, a sound that seems to be drumming right up out of his childhood, out of a memory of wakening to hear and see a herd of numinous, out-of-this-world horses streaming past the leafy end of the suburban avenue where he lived in Belfast.
In childhood he woke to a sort of vision, but in London, to a sort of disappointment. His hotel, it would seem, was somewhere near Horseguards' Parade since the poem concludes, "I saw by the men astride/ That these were the king's horses, never mine." In context the lines convey a deep sense of loss and regret. For once, Hewitt's stand-off from the monarchical and the equestrian was not a declaration of egalitarian principle, but a rueful recognition that as a poet he was sceptical of the efficiencies and certitudes of the corps spirit in general.
In fact, Hewitt in this poem about the horses is like Lawrence in his poem about the snake - a man being reminded of realities beyond those which are socially and culturally based, a man very like the one he declared himself to be in 1973 when he wrote that his allegiance was to "intuitions, intimations, imaginative re alisations, epiphanies" and added that allegiance to such things "may not be the worst way to face life and its future in our bitter, hate-riven land."
AS the referendum on the future of the country, north and south, approaches, each person has to ponder another question that preoccupied Hewitt in that 1973 essay ("No Rootless Colonist") - what is to be the political destiny of a colony once it is no longer a colony but a workable region? And in these circumstances, the solitude and tenderness and pre-political recognitions of "The King's Horses" seem more and more to the point.
In a way, this is a poem about the kind of honesty test we can sometimes face in the privacy of the polling booth. If solidarity is expected anywhere, it is surely there. And yet in that guaranteed secrecy the desire to break ranks can also arise. Most intelligent people will have occasionally experienced a feeling of answerability to something beyond party, the desire, for instance, to salute some ethical or imaginative superiority in a political opponent.
Whether or not one acts upon such promptings is not the point. The point is that they too are indications of that hunger that exists in all of us to be more serious, a hunger that the poet, quotation marked or not, does keep awake. Maybe I should have mentioned Marina Tsvetayeva as well as Dante. What was that old notion of hers about "art in the light of conscience?"