'The importance of being elsewhere', or 'No man is an Ireland': self, selves and social consensus in the poetry of

Edwardian era was to the speaker of Larkin's 'MCMXIV'. Thinking ourselves sadder and wiser, we may also murmur ruefully 'Never such innocence again', and rightly see the idealisation of the not- too-immediate past as a general cultural tendency. These were the decades of Larkin's major poetry, and their gradually increasing prosperity and queasy social consensus haunt it (and us) like a slightly abashed Zeitgeist. Larkin is the uneasy, unwilling celebrator of relative affluence, of meritocracy and the Welfare State, a slightly awkward guest at the banquet of the new materialism.1 The tackiness of mass commodities fascinates him, and the very modesty of material aspirations awakes in him a sneaking solidarity with the many who have to make do with the crumbs from the table. Nor does he begrudge those who 'leave at dawn low terraced houses' their 'Summer Casuals', although a slightly superior register is heard when he is confronted by the exotic taste 'their sort' has in nightwear ('The Large Cool Store'). But even this is more bafflement than snobbery. He might possess 'the saddest heart in the postwar supermarket',2 but at least he goes there to look around. In the lists of consumer durables he rattles off - 'Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies' ('Here') - there is pathos rather than disdain. For it was in the original affluent society, basking in the absence of slump, unemployment, war, reforms or austerity that Larkin could discover his own poetics of absence and in doing so repudiate the 'excesses' of his literary forebears - Yeats, Auden, Dylan Thomas - precisely because of the perceived difference between his time and theirs. Seedy prosperity might be unheroic, and the