Return to the CONTENT page, or the Events Reports page
2007 – The Philip Larkin Society AGM
'Something to Declare: A look back at a lifetime with poetry' – by James Booth.
James Booth reports on the talk by Colin Dexter, the Distinguished Guest Speaker at the Society's Annual General Meeting, 9 June 2007.
[From About Larkin 24, October 2007]
'Larkin Decoded by the Creator of Morse!' ran the tricksy advertisement on the poster (characteristically, Colin Dexter himself had not objected to this queasy pun.) In the event, a rapt audience in the Middleton Hall was enthralled by something much more profound, and also much more entertaining, than an analysis of Larkin's poetry. Colin's talk, more a confidential chat than a lecture, despite the size of his audience, was a tour de force of anecdotal wit and passionate argument. His contention was that society has lost something valuable in its current disrespect for the practice of learning poetry by heart. For him, poetry has been a source of consolation and sustenance. In a narrative rich with evocative quotations, he recalled the days when every schoolchild could recite Shakespeare's great soliloquies, stanzas from Gray's 'Elegy' or lines from Keats.
Today things are different. Instead of valuing 'learning by heart', we deplore mere 'learning by rote'. But do our hearts not suffer if we fail to educate them in such poetic distillations of shared thoughts and emotions?
The argument would have been music to the ears of Philip Larkin, who succeeded in making so many of his lines familiar and unforgettable. Colin certainly persuaded the Larkin Society audience. Self-deprecating, wryly comic, eloquent and deeply moving, he held us in the palm of his hand.
The Vice Chancellor, David Drewry, Gillian Drewry and Colin Dexter.
David and Gillian became fast friends with Colin in Oxford during the 1990s.
Photograph © James Booth 2007
Return to the CONTENT page, or the Events Reports page