"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Sunday, July 24, 2022

Philip Larkin - The Trees and Other Poems, Vids, Bios




Philip Larkin "The Trees" (Read by the poet himself)
Dec 23, 2015



The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.



Philip Larkin: Love and Death in Hull
179,987 views  Jan 17, 2013  Philip Larkin: Love and Death in Hull (Channel 4)


A decent documentary on Philip Larkin's life as the 'Hermit of Hull'.
I apologise for the poor video quality, it's the only one I could find.
I suppose that this being Larkin, the VHS bleakness fits. 


Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was: 
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.






Faith Healing

Slowly the women file to where he stands   
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly   
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,   
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care   
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,   
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer   
Directing God about this eye, that knee.   
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some   
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud   
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb   
And idiot child within them still survives   
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice   
At last calls them alone, that hands have come   
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd   
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice—

What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:   
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps   
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make   
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.   
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,   
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above   
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.


Poet Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin

Jump to navigationJump to search
Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin in a library.gif
Photograph by Fay Godwin (1970)
Born
Philip Arthur Larkin

9 August 1922
Coventry, England
Died2 December 1985 (aged 63)
Resting placeCottingham municipal cemetery
53°47′00.98″N 0°25′50.19″W
MonumentsBronze statue, Martin Jennings (2010), Hull Paragon Interchange Station
Alma materSt John's College, Oxford
OccupationPoet, librarian, novelist, jazz critic
EmployerUniversity of Hull (1955–85)
Notable work
The Whitsun Weddings (1964), High Windows (1974)

Philip Arthur Larkin CH CBE FRSL (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, with his articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973).[1] His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.[2] He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.

After graduating from Oxford University in 1943 with a first in English Language and Literature, Larkin became a librarian. It was during the thirty years he worked with distinction as university librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull that he produced the greater part of his published work. His poems are marked by what Andrew Motion calls "a very English, glum accuracy" about emotions, places, and relationships, and what Donald Davie described as "lowered sights and diminished expectations". Eric Homberger (echoing Randall Jarrell) called him "the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket"—Larkin himself said that deprivation for him was "what daffodils were for Wordsworth".[3] Influenced by W. H. AudenW. B. Yeats, and Thomas Hardy, his poems are highly structured but flexible verse forms. They were described by Jean Hartley, the ex-wife of Larkin's publisher George Hartley (the Marvell Press), as a "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent",[4] though anthologist Keith Tuma writes that there is more to Larkin's work than its reputation for dour pessimism suggests.[5]

Larkin's public persona was that of the no-nonsense, solitary Englishman who disliked fame and had no patience for the trappings of the public literary life.[6] The posthumous publication by Anthony Thwaite in 1992 of his letters triggered controversy about his personal life and political views, described by John Banville as hair-raising, but also in places hilarious.[6] Lisa Jardine called him a "casual, habitual racist, and an easy misogynist", but the academic John Osborne argued in 2008 that "the worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment".[7] Despite the controversy Larkin was chosen in a 2003 Poetry Book Society survey, almost two decades after his death, as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous 50 years, and in 2008 The Times named him Britain's greatest post-war writer.[8]

In 1973 a Coventry Evening Telegraph reviewer referred to Larkin as "the bard of Coventry",[9] but in 2010, 25 years after his death, it was Larkin's adopted home city, Kingston upon Hull, that commemorated him with the Larkin 25 Festival[10] which culminated in the unveiling of a statue of Larkin by Martin Jennings on 2 December 2010, the 25th anniversary of his death.[11][12][13] On 2 December 2016, the 31st anniversary of his death, a floor stone memorial for Larkin was unveiled at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.[14]



* * * * * * * *


This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.


Poet Philip Larkin (Image credit: Lucy Izzard)


Philip Larkin: England’s most miserable genius?

by James Booth
December 1, 2015


Philip Larkin remains one of Britain’s most controversial – and loved – poets.
His colleague James Booth looks back.


Thirty years after his death, the poet Philip Larkin is finally to be awarded a memorial in Westminster Abbey’s ‘Poets’ Corner’ – that revered shrine to British writers. Chaucer, Dickens and Tennyson are buried there, while many others – Shakespeare, Keats and Wilde included – have been memorialised. 

After the posthumous publication of his letters, Larkin’s reputation was marred by accusations of misogyny and racism – but this did little to damage his stature as a writer. In 2003, a survey taken by the Poetry Book Society named him the nation’s best-loved poet of the last 50 years. 

His relatively small but brilliant body of work, from The Whitsun Weddings to High Windows offers a distinctive flavour of post-war England. But what was Larkin’s own attitude to his country?

‘Contrarian spirit’

The word 'England' appears in Larkin’s mature poetry only four times. “My God”, he wrote in a letter, “surely nationalism is the surest mark of mediocrity!” In The Importance of Elsewhere, the prospect of return to England from five years in Ireland fills him with apprehension. There he felt “welcome” since his “difference” was expected and allowed. “Living in England has no such excuse,” he wrote. Back among his own 'customs and establishments' he would be required to conform.

Books are a load of crap – Philip Larkin

And of course he did conform. Official photographs show him in 1961, as librarian in full academic garb, proudly looking on as the Queen Mother opened the new library in Hull into which he had put so much work. The volume of essays on librarianship published in his honour after his death attests to a distinguished career. But he was a 'poet-librarian', and as far as the poet was concerned “Books are a load of crap”. And in any case: “Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.”

Larkin's view of the nation's customs and establishments is ambiguous. He would dissolve in tears listening to the Armistice Day ceremony on the radio. But in November 1950, in sheer bloody-mindedness, he refused to buy a poppy. He wrote to his mother: “no particular reason, except that the hags are so confident when they approach you”. 

In a letter he called The Trees ‘bloody awful tripe’

This contrarian spirit extended to his poetry. He was aware that the emotional uplift of The Trees would make it a popular poem. “Last year is dead” the leaves seem to say: “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”  But in a letter he called the poem ”very corny”, and after the workbook draft he added the comment: “bloody awful tripe”.

Larkin may have enjoyed acting up to his conservative public image, sitting
po-faced in photographs by an ENGLAND road sign (Credit: Lucy Izzard)

He may have enjoyed acting up to his conservative, curmudgeonly public image, sitting po-faced in photographs by an ENGLAND road sign. But his poetry is not provincially English; it is universal with an English flavour. “I suppose the kind of response I am seeking from the reader is, Yes, I know what you mean, life is like that; and for readers to say it … not only in England but anywhere in the world.” The pure lyric vocabulary of The Trees makes it an easy poem to translate.

The Whitsun Weddings may evoke a particularly English social scene, but the 'frail travelling coincidence' of the train journey, and the bustle on the platforms, speak to readers across cultures:

  … fathers had never known
Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding.

The ‘other Poet Laureate’

Larkin was never Poet Laureate. Many felt he should have been offered the position in 1972, but John Betjeman was preferred. In 1982 Larkin asserted that “poetry” and “sovereignty” are both “very primitive things”. “I like to think of their being united in this way, in England”. The Laureate is, of course, appointed directly by the monarch, though since Wordsworth stipulated as a condition of his acceptance that he not be required to memorialise royal events (what Larkin referred to as “bloody babies”) this has not been compulsory.

Larkin was aware that the emotional uplift of The Trees would make it
a popular poem but he later called it ”very corny” (Credit: Lucy Izzard)

By the time Betjeman died in May 1984 Larkin was only months from his own death, and could only decline the position when it was offered to him. He wrote wistfully to Kingsley Amis: “the thought of being the cause of Ted's being buried in Westminster Abbey is hard to live with”. 

Ted Hughes became Laureate and in due course, as Larkin forecast, he was commemorated with a memorial in Westminster Abbey, in 2011. Many raised their eyebrows at this. Alan Bennett wrote in his diary: “Though Hughes fits the popular notion of what a poet should be, many more of Larkin's writings have passed into the national memory.” 

Larkin called himself ‘an agnostic, I suppose, 

but an Anglican agnostic, of course’

Now, a little late, Larkin is to join Betjeman and Hughes in Poets' Corner. Since Anglicanism is, for the present, the state-established religion, this honour is in the gift of the Dean of Westminster, and Larkin's installation will take the form of a religious service. Is this entirely inappropriate? Larkin called himself “an agnostic, I suppose, but an Anglican agnostic, of course”. 

A little late, Larkin is to join John Betjeman and Ted Hughes
in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey (Credit: Getty Images)

He loved the country churches which knit the English landscape together. In his only positively charged poetic use of the word 'England', in Going, Going, he deplores pollution and urban sprawl: “And that will be England gone, / The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, / The guildhalls, the carved choirs.” But, eloquent though this poem is, he derided it in a letter as “thin ranting conventional gruel”. What really moved him about churches was not nostalgia for an archaic England, but the fact that “so many dead lie round”.

Larkin’s atheism was unflinching, courageous

That 'agnostic' was a polite evasion. His atheism was unflinching, courageous. He commented on the Bible: “It's absolutely bloody amazing to think that anyone ever believed any of that. Really, it's absolute balls.” For Larkin religion was a “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.” We may wish that the clasped hands on the Arundel tomb could 'prove' that “What will survive of us is love”. But this is an 'almost true' 'almost-instinct'. He wrote in the margin of his workbook: ' “Love isn't stronger than death just because statues hold hands for 600 years”. 

He was touched deeply only by love, death and ‘being alive, in the flesh’

Larkin's was the purest of lyric sensibilities: always here, always now. He was touched deeply only by the existential fundamentals: love, death, and “being alive, in the flesh”: “the million-petalled flower of being here”. His fear of extinction is harrowing: “Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.” Larkin is the laureate of a post-Christian, secular England; and it is much to the credit of the Dean that he has granted him space in this Anglican sanctum. But the English/British cultural establishment has long been a patchwork of compromises between contradictions. Larkin's fellow atheists AE Housman and Percy Bysshe Shelley are already there, waiting for him to join them.  

* * * * * * * *


Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.   
They come, they wake us   
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:   
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor   
In their long coats
Running over the fields.


Poet Philip Larkin talking about his new anthology 'The Oxford Book of 20th Century
English Verse' prior to its inclusion on the BBC television series 'Poetry Prom', July 1973.
(Photo by Barry Wilkinson/Radio Times via Getty Images)

Poet Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry, England in 1922. He earned his BA from St. John’s College, Oxford, where he befriended novelist and poet Kingsley Amis and finished with First Class Honors in English. After graduating, Larkin undertook professional studies to become a librarian. He worked in libraries his entire life, first in Shropshire and Leicester, and then at Queen’s College in Belfast, and finally as librarian at the University of Hull. In addition to collections of poetry, Larkin published two novels—Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947)—as well as criticism, essays, and reviews of jazz music. The latter were collected in two volumes: All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1968 (1970; 1985) and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 (1984). He was one of post-war England’s most famous poets, and was commonly referred to as “England’s other Poet Laureate” until his death in 1985. Indeed, when the position of laureate became vacant in 1984, many poets and critics favored Larkin’s appointment, but Larkin preferred to avoid the limelight.

Larkin achieved acclaim on the strength of an extremely small body of work—just over one hundred pages of poetry in four slender volumes that appeared at almost decade-long intervals. These collections, especially The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974), present “a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people, can take comfort and delight,” according to X.J. Kennedy in the New Criterion. Larkin employed the traditional tools of poetry—rhyme, stanza, and meter—to explore the often uncomfortable or terrifying experiences thrust upon common people in the modern age. As Alan Brownjohn noted in Philip Larkin, the poet produced without fanfare “the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any English poet in the last twenty-five years.”

Despite his wide popularity, Larkin “shied from publicity, rarely consented to interviews or readings, cultivated his image as right-wing curmudgeon and grew depressed at his fame,” according to J.D. McClatchy in the New York Times Book Review. Phoenix contributor Alun R. Jones suggests that, as librarian at the remote University of Hull, Larkin “avoided the literary, the metropolitan, the group label, and embraced the nonliterary, the provincial, and the purely personal.” From his base in Hull, Larkin composed poetry that both reflected the dreariness of postwar provincial England and voiced the spiritual despair of the modern age. McClatchy notes Larkin wrote “in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires.” Critics feel that this localization of focus and the colloquial language used to describe settings and emotions endear Larkin to his readers. Agenda reviewer George Dekker noted that no living poet “can equal Larkin on his own ground of the familiar English lyric, drastically and poignantly limited in its sense of any life beyond, before or after, life today in England.”

Throughout his life, England was Larkin’s emotional territory to an eccentric degree. The poet distrusted travel abroad and professed ignorance of foreign literature, including most modern American poetry. He also tried to avoid the cliches of his own culture, such as the tendency to read portent into an artist’s childhood. In his poetry and essays, Larkin remembered his early years as “unspent” and “boring,” as he grew up the son of a city treasurer in Coventry. Poor eyesight and stuttering plagued Larkin as a youth; he retreated into solitude, read widely, and began to write poetry as a nightly routine. In 1940 he enrolled at Oxford, beginning “a vital stage in his personal and literary development,” according to Bruce K. Martin in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. At Oxford Larkin studied English literature and cultivated the friendship of those who shared his special interests, including Kingsley Amis and John Wain. He graduated with first class honors in 1943, and, having to account for himself with the wartime Ministry of Labor, he took a position as librarian in the small Shropshire town of Wellington. While there he wrote both of his novels as well as The North Ship, his first volume of poetry. After working at several other university libraries, Larkin moved to Hull in 1955 and began a 30-year association with the library at the University of Hull. He is still admired for his expansion and modernization of that facility.

Larkin’s Selected Letters, edited by his longtime friend, poet Anthony Thwaite, reveals much about the writer’s personal and professional life between 1940 and 1985. Washington Post Book World reviewer John Simon noted that the letters are “about intimacy, conviviality, and getting things off one’s heaving chest into a heedful ear.” He suggests that “these cheerful, despairing, frolicsome, often foul-mouthed, grouchy, self-assertive and self-depreciating missives should not be missed by anyone who appreciates Larkin’s verse.”

In a Paris Review interview, Larkin dismissed the notion that he studied the techniques of poets that he admired in order to perfect his craft. Most critics feel, however, that the poems of both William Butler Yeats and Thomas Hardy exerted an influence on Larkin as he sought his own voice. Hardy’s work provided the main impetus to Larkin’s mature poetry, according to critics. A biographer in Contemporary Literary Criticism claimed “Larkin credited his reading of Thomas Hardy’s verse for inspiring him to write with greater austerity and to link experiences and emotions with detailed settings.” In Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction (Methuen, 1979), Peter R. King contends that a close reading of Hardy taught Larkin “that a modern poet could write about the life around him in the language of the society around him. He encouraged [Larkin] to use his poetry to examine the reality of his own life.” In his work Philip Larkin, Martin also claims that Larkin learned from Hardy “that his own life, with its often casual discoveries, could become poems, and that he could legitimately share such experience with his readers. From this lesson [came Larkin’s] belief that a poem is better based on something from ‘unsorted’ experience than on another poem or other art.”

This viewpoint allied Larkin with the poets of The Movement, a loose association of British writers who “called, implicitly in their poetry and fiction and explicitly in critical essays, for some sort of commonsense return to more traditional techniques,” according to Martin in Philip Larkin. Martin added that the rationale for this “antimodernist, antiexperimental stance is their stated concern with clarity: with writing distinguished by precision rather than obscurity. ... [The Movement urged] not an abandonment of emotion, but a mixture of rationality with feeling, of objective control with subjective abandon. Their notion of what they felt the earlier generation of writers, particularly poets, lacked, centered around the ideas of honesty and realism about self and about the outside world.” King observed that Larkin “had sympathy with many of the attitudes to poetry represented by The Movement,” but this view of the poet’s task antedated the beginnings of that group’s influence. Nonetheless, in the opinion of Washington Post Book World contributor Chad Walsh, Larkin says “seemed to fulfill the credo of the Movement better than anyone else, and he was often singled out, as much for damnation as for praise, by those looking for the ultimate Movement poet.” Brownjohn concludes that in the company of The Movement, Larkin’s own “distinctive technical skills, the special subtlety in his adaptation of a very personal colloquial mode to the demands of tight forms, were not immediately seen to be outstanding; but his strengths as a craftsman have increasingly come to be regarded as one of the hallmarks of his talent.”

Those strengths of craftsmanship and technical skill in Larkin’s mature works received almost universal approval from literary critics. London Sunday Times correspondent Ian Hamilton wrote: “Supremely among recent poets, [Larkin] was able to accommodate a talking voice to the requirements of strict metres and tight rhymes, and he had a faultless ear for the possibilities of the iambic line.” David Timms expressed a similar view in his book entitled Philip Larkin. Technically, notes Timms, Larkin was “an extraordinarily various and accomplished poet, a poet who [used] the devices of metre and rhyme for specific effects… His language is never flat, unless he intends it to be so for a particular reason, and his diction is never stereotyped. He [was] always ready… to reach across accepted literary boundaries for a word that will precisely express what he intends.” As King explains, Larkin’s best poems “are rooted in actual experiences and convey a sense of place and situation, people and events, which gives an authenticity to the thoughts that are then usually raised by the poet’s observation of the scene… Joined with this strength of careful social observation is a control over tone changes and the expression of developing feelings even within a single poem… which is the product of great craftsmanship. To these virtues must be added the fact that in all the poems there is a lucidity of language which invites understanding even when the ideas expressed are paradoxical or complex.” New Leader contributor Pearl K. Bell concludes that Larkin’s poetry “fits with unresisting precision into traditional structures… filling them with the melancholy truth of things in the shrunken, vulgarized and parochial England of the 1970s.”

If Larkin’s style was traditional, the subject matter of his poetry was derived exclusively from modern life. In the Southern Review, John Press contended that Larkin’s artistic work “delineates with considerable force and delicacy the pattern of contemporary sensibility, tracing the way in which we respond to our environment, plotting the ebb and flow of the emotional flux within us, embodying in his poetry attitudes of heart and mind that seem peculiarly characteristic of our time: doubt, insecurity, boredom, aimlessness and malaise.” A sense that life is a finite prelude to oblivion underlies many of Larkin’s poems. King suggests that the work is “a poetry of disappointment, of the destruction of romantic illusions, of man’s defeat by time and his own inadequacies,” as well as a study of how dreams, hopes, and ideals “are relentlessly diminished by the realities of life.” To Larkin, Brownjohn noted, life was never “a matter of blinding revelations, mystical insights, expectations glitteringly fulfilled. Life, for Larkin, and, implicitly, for all of us, is something lived mundanely, with a gradually accumulating certainty that its golden prizes are sheer illusion.” Love is one of the supreme deceptions of humankind in Larkin’s worldview, as King observed: “Although man clutches at his instinctive belief that only love will comfort, console and sustain him, such a hope is doomed to be denied. A lover’s promise is an empty promise and the power to cure suffering through love is a tragic illusion.” Stanley Poss in Western Humanities Review maintained that Larkin’s poems demonstrate “desperate clarity and restraint and besieged common sense. And what they mostly say is, be beginning to despair, despair, despair.”

Larkin arrived at his conclusions candidly, concerned to expose evasions so that the reader might stand “naked but honest, ‘less deceived’ ... before the realities of life and death,” to quote King. Larkin himself offered a rather wry description of his accomplishments—an assessment that, despite its levity, links him emotionally to his work. In 1979 he told the Observer: “I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any… Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

Critics can find moments of affirmation in Larkin’s poetry, notwithstanding its pessimistic and cynical bent. Brownjohn admits that Larkin’s works take a bleak view of human existence; at the same time, however, they contain “the recurrent reflection that others, particularly the young, might still find happiness in expectation.” Contemporary Literature essayist James Naremore expanded on Larkin’s tendency to detach himself from the action in his poems: “From the beginning, Larkin’s work has manifested a certain coolness and lack of self-esteem, a need to withdraw from experience; but at the same time it has continued to show his desire for a purely secular type of romance… Larkin is trying to assert his humanity, not deny it… The greatest virtue in Larkin’s poetry is not so much his suppression of large poetic gestures as his ability to recover an honest sense of joy and beauty.” The New York Times once quoted Larkin as having said that a poem “represents the mastering, even if just for a moment, of the pessimism and the melancholy, and enables you—you the poet, and you, the reader—to go on.” King sensed this quiet catharsis when he concluded: “Although one’s final impression of the poetry is certainly that the chief emphasis is placed on a life ‘unspent’ in the shadow of ‘untruth,’ moments of beauty and affirmation are not entirely denied. It is the difficulty of experiencing such moments after one has become so aware of the numerous self-deceptions that man practices on himself to avoid the uncomfortable reality which lies at the heart of Larkin’s poetic identity.”

Dedicated to reaching out for his readers, the poet was a staunch opponent of modernism in all artistic media. Larkin felt that such cerebral experimentation ultimately created a barrier between an artist and the audience and provided unnecessary thematic complications. Larkin’s “demand for fidelity to experience is supported by his insistence that poetry should both communicate and give pleasure to the reader,” King noted, adding: “It would be a mistake to dismiss this attitude as a form of simple literary conservatism. Larkin is not so much expressing an anti-intellectualism as attacking a particular form of artistic snobbery.” In Philip Larkin, Martin commented that the poet saw the need for poetry to move toward the “paying customer.” Therefore, his writings concretize “many of the questions which have perplexed man almost since his beginning but which in modern times have become the province principally of academicians… [Larkin’s poetry reflects] his faith in the common reader to recognize and respond to traditional philosophical concerns when stripped of undue abstractions and pretentious labels.” Brownjohn found Larkin eminently successful in his aims: “It is indeed true that many of his readers find pleasure and interest in Larkin’s poetry for its apparent accessibility and its cultivation of verse forms that seem reassuringly traditional rather than ‘modernist’ in respect of rhyme and metre.” As Timms succinctly noted, originality for Larkin consisted “not in modifying the medium of communication, but in communicating something different.”

“Much that is admirable in the best of [Larkin’s] work is felt [in Collected Poems]: firmness and delicacy of cadence, a definite geography, a mutually fortifying congruence between what the language means to say and what it musically embodies,” asserted Seamus Heaney in the Observer. The collection contains Larkin’s six previous volumes of poetry as well as 83 of his unpublished poems gleaned from notebooks and homemade booklets. The earliest poems (which reflect the style and social concerns of W.H. Auden) date from his schooldays and the latest close to his death. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Books, Alan Shapiro pointed out, “Reading the work in total, we can see how Larkin, early and late, is a poet of great and complex feeling.” Larkin “[endowed] the most commonplace objects and occasions with a chilling poignancy, [measuring] daily life with all its tedium and narrowness against the possibilities of feeling,” adds Shapiro.

Larkin’s output of fiction and essays is hardly more extensive than his poetry. His two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, were both published before his 25th birthday. New Statesman correspondent Clive James feels that both novels “seem to point forward to the poetry. Taken in their chronology, they are impressively mature and self-sufficient.” James adds that the fiction is so strong that “if Larkin had never written a line of verse, his place as a writer would still have been secure.” Although the novels received little critical attention when they first appeared, they have since been judged highly successful. Brownjohn called Jill “one of the better novels written about England during the Second World War, not so much for any conscious documentary effort put into it as for Larkin’s characteristic scrupulousness in getting all the background details right.” In the New York Review of Books, John Bayley noted that A Girl in Winter is “a real masterpiece, a quietly gripping novel, dense with the humor that is Larkin’s trademark, and also an extended prose poem.” Larkin’s essay collections, Required Writing and All What Jazz, are compilations of critical pieces he wrote for periodicals over a 30-year period, including the jazz record reviews he penned as a music critic for the London Daily Telegraph. “Everything Larkin writes is concise, elegant and wholly original,” Bayley claimed in the Listener, “and this is as true of his essays and reviews as it is of his poetry.” Elsewhere in the New York Review of Books, Bayley comments that Required Writing “reveals wide sympathies, deep and trenchant perceptions, a subterraneous grasp of the whole of European culture.” And in an essay on All What Jazz for Anthony Thwaite’s Larkin at Sixty, James concludes that “no wittier book of criticism has ever been written.”

Larkin stopped writing poetry shortly after his collection High Windows was published in 1974. In an Observer obituary, Kingsley Amis characterized the poet as “a man much driven in upon himself, with increasing deafness from early middle age cruelly emphasizing his seclusion.” Small though it is, Larkin’s body of work has “altered our awareness of poetry’s capacity to reflect the contemporary world,” according to London Magazine correspondent Roger Garfitt. A.N. Wilson drew a similar conclusion in the Spectator: “Perhaps the reason Larkin made such a great name from so small an oeuvre was that he so exactly caught the mood of so many of us… Larkin found the perfect voice for expressing our worst fears.” That voice was “stubbornly indigenous,” according to Robert B. Shaw in Poetry Nation. Larkin appealed primarily to the British sensibility; he remained unencumbered by any compunction to universalize his poems by adopting a less regional idiom. Perhaps as a consequence, his poetry sells remarkably well in Great Britain, his readers come from all walks of life, and his untimely cancer-related death in 1985 has not diminished his popularity. Andrew Sullivan feels that Larkin “has spoken to the English in a language they can readily understand of the profound self-doubt that this century has given them. He was, of all English poets, a laureate too obvious to need official recognition.”

In 2002, a notebook containing unpublished poems by Larkin was found in a garbage dump in England, and the notebook’s current owner consulted with auction houses in preparation for selling it. The Society of Authors was to look into legal issues involved in the matter. Then in 2004 came publication of another Collected Poems, again edited by Thwaite. While the first Collected Poems from 1989 was arranged chronologically, this was not the order that Larkin himself had used when first publishing them. Additionally, Thwaite published previously unpublished poems and fragments in the earlier volume, drawing some criticism from Larkin scholars. With the 2004 Collected Poems, such matters were corrected. One hundred pages shorter than the earlier volume, and ordered to Larkin’s original desires, this second version “does give the verse itself a better shake,” according to John Updike writing in the New Yorker. Yet it is hard to please everyone, as Melanie Rehak noted in a Nation review. “Just as some quibbled when Thwaite diverged from Larkin’s chosen path in his previous collection,” Rehak noted, “there are absences in this new edition that also diminish it.” However, for Daniel Torday, reviewing the second Collected Poems in Esquire, the book was a success. “Twenty years after [Larkin’s] death,” wrote Torday, “a newly revised [version]… has arrived to remind us that Larkin was more the man’s poet of the 20th century than [Charles] Bukowski or [Jack] Kerouac.” Torday also felt that Larkin was able to ignore “any audience but himself… That crass, stubborn, and yet unavoidably lovable curmudgeon who tends to poke his head out at the most inopportune times.”



* * * * * * * *


Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   
Till then I see what’s really always there:   
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   
Making all thought impossible but how   
And where and when I shall myself die.   
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   
—The good not done, the love not given, time   
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   
That slows each impulse down to indecision.   
Most things may never happen: this one will,   
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without   
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave   
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

A FEW SELECTED TITLES
BY POET PHILIP LARKIN


   

   

   

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s   
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—   
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if   
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,   
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide   
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide   
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

List of poems by Philip Larkin

Jump to navigationJump to search

The list of poems by Philip Larkin come mostly from the four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime:[1][2]

Philip Larkin (1922–1985) also published other poems. They, along with the contents of the four published collections, are included in the 2003 edition of his Collected Poems in two appendices. The previous 1988 edition contains everything that appears in the 2003 edition and additionally includes all the known mature poems that he did not publish during his lifetime, plus an appendix of early work. To help differentiate between these published and unpublished poems in our table all poems that appear in the 2003 edition's appendices are listed as Collected Poems 2003; of course, they also appear in the 1988 volume.

Since 1988 many other unpublished, and as yet uncollected, poems have come to light. Some of these poems have now been included in "The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin," edited by Archie Burnett.[3]

List of poems

The following is the list of 244 poems attributed to Philip Larkin. Untitled poems are identified by their first lines and marked with an ellipsis. Completion dates are in the YYYY-MM-DD format, and are tagged "(best known date)" if the date is not definitive.


Poem titleCompletion dateBook
Absences1950-11-28The Less Deceived
Administration1965-03-03Collected Poems 1988
After-Dinner Remarks1940-06 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Afternoons1959-09 (best known date)The Whitsun Weddings
Age1954-05-26The Less Deceived
All catches alight... (to Bruce Montgomery)1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Ambulances1961-01-10The Whitsun Weddings
An April Sunday brings the snow...1948-04-04Collected Poems 1988
An Arundel Tomb1956-02-20The Whitsun Weddings
And now the leaves suddenly lose strength...1961-11-03Collected Poems 1988
And the wave sings because it is moving...1946-09-14Collected Poems 1988
Annus Mirabilis1967-06-16High Windows
Ape Experiment Room1965-02-24Collected Poems 1988
Arrival1950 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
Arrivals, Departures1953-01-24The Less Deceived
As a war in years of peace...1940 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
As Bad as a Mile1960-02-09The Whitsun Weddings
At Grass1950-01-03The Less Deceived
At the chiming of light upon sleep...1946-10-04Collected Poems 1988
At thirty-one, when some are rich... (unfinished)1953-08 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Aubade1977-11-29Collected Poems 1988
Autobiography at an Air-Station1953-12-06Collected Poems 1988
Autumn1953-10 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Autumn has caught us in our summer wear...1939 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Best Society1951 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Born Yesterday (for Sally Amis)1954-01-20The Less Deceived
The bottle is drunk out by one...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Breadfruit1961-11-19Collected Poems 2003
Bridge for the Living1975–12 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
Broadcast1961-11-06The Whitsun Weddings
The Building1972-02-09High Windows
By day, a lifted study-storehouse...1983-10 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
The Card-Players1970-05-06High Windows
Church Going1954-07-28The Less Deceived
Climbing the hill within the deafening wind...1944-10-23The North Ship
Come then to prayers...1946-05-13Collected Poems 1988
Coming1950-02-25The Less Deceived
Coming at last to night's most thankful springs...1945-03-01Collected Poems 1988
Compline1950-02-12Collected Poems 1988
Conscript (for James Ballard Sutton)1941-10 (best known date)The North Ship
Continuing to Live1954-04-24Collected Poems 2003
Counting1955–09 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Cut Grass1971-06-03High Windows
The daily things we do...1979-02 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
The Dance (unfinished)1964-05-12Collected Poems 1988
The Dancer1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Dawn1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Days1953-08-03The Whitsun Weddings
Dear Charles, My Muse, asleep or dead...1982 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
Deceptions1950-02-20The Less Deceived
The Dedicated1946-09-18Collected Poems 2003
Deep Analysis1946-04 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Disintegration1942-02 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
Dockery and Son1963-03-28The Whitsun Weddings
Dry–Point[1]1950-03-17The Less Deceived
Dublinesque1970-06-06High Windows
Essential Beauty1962-06-26The Whitsun Weddings
The Explosion1970-01-05High Windows
Faith Healing1960-05-10The Whitsun Weddings
Far Out1959-02-01Collected Poems 1988
Femmes Damnées1943 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
Fiction and the Reading Public1950-02-25Collected Poems 2003
First Sight1956-03-03The Whitsun Weddings
For Sidney Bechet1954-01-15The Whitsun Weddings
Forget What Did1971-08-06High Windows
Fragment from May1938 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel1966-05-20High Windows
Gathering Wood1954-03-25Collected Poems 1988
Going1946–02 (best known date)The Less Deceived
Going, Going1972-01-25High Windows
Good for you, Gavin...1981-11-26Collected Poems 1988
Having grown up in shade of Church and State...1939-06 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
He Hears that his Beloved has become Engaged (for C.G.B.)1953-01-29Collected Poems 1988
Heads in the Women's Ward1972-03-06Collected Poems 2003
Heaviest of flowers, the head...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Here1961-10-08The Whitsun Weddings
High Windows1967-02-12High Windows
The hills in their recumbent postures...1940-03 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Homage to a Government1969-01-10High Windows
Home is so Sad1958-12-31The Whitsun Weddings
The horns of the morning...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Hospital Visits1953-12-04Collected Poems 1988
The house on the edge of the serious wood...1941-04 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
How1970-04-10Collected Poems 2003
How Distant1965-11-24High Windows
How to Sleep1950-03-10Collected Poems 1988
I am washed upon a rock...1949-03-19Collected Poems 1988
I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land1943 (best known date)The North Ship
I have started to say...1971-10 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
I put my mouth...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
I Remember, I Remember1954-01-08The Less Deceived
If grief could burn out...1944-10-05The North Ship
I see a girl dragged by the wrists...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
If hands could free you, heart...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
If, My Darling1950-05-23The Less Deceived
Ignorance1955-09-11The Whitsun Weddings
In times when nothing stood...1978-03-02Collected Poems 2003
The Importance of Elsewhere1955-06-13The Whitsun Weddings
Is it for now or for always...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Kick up the fire, and let the flames break loose...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
The Large Cool Store1961-06-18The Whitsun Weddings
Last Will and Testament1940-09 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Latest Face1951-02 (best known date)The Less Deceived
Letter to a Friend about Girls1959-12 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
The Life with a Hole in it1974-08-08Collected Poems 2003
Lift through the breaking day...1945-08-27Collected Poems 1988
Like the train's beat...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album1953-09-18The Less Deceived
The Literary World1950-03-20Collected Poems 1988
The little lives of earth and form...1977-05-06Collected Poems 1988
Livings: I, II, III1971-12-10High Windows
Long Last1963-02-03Collected Poems 1988
Long lion days...1982-07-21Collected Poems 1988
Long roots moor summer to our side of earth...1954-06-12Collected Poems 1988
Long Sight in Age1955-06-20Collected Poems 1988
Love1962-12-07Collected Poems 2003
Love Again1979-09-20Collected Poems 1988
Love Songs in Age1957-01-01The Whitsun Weddings
Love, we must part now...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
MCMXIV1960-05-17The Whitsun Weddings
Maiden Name1955-01-15The Less Deceived
Many famous feet have trod...1946-10-15Collected Poems 1988
The March Past1951-05-25Collected Poems 1988
Marriages1951-06-12Collected Poems 1988
Maturity1951 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
May Weather1941-06-05Collected Poems 2003
Midsummer Night, 19401940-06 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Midwinter Waking195401-27Collected Poems 1988
Modesties1949-05-13Collected Poems 2003
Money1973-02-19High Windows
The moon is full tonight...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Morning at last: there in the snow...1976-02-01Collected Poems 1988
Morning has spread again...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Mother, Summer, I1953-08 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
The Mower1979-06-12Collected Poems 2003
Mr Bleaney1955-05 (best known date)The Whitsun Weddings
Mythological Introduction1943 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
Myxomatosis1954 (best known date)The Less Deceived
Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses1961-02-22The Whitsun Weddings
Negative Indicative (unfinished)1953-12-28Collected Poems 1988
Neurotics1949-03 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
New eyes each year...1979-02 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
New Year Poem1940-12-31Collected Poems 1988
Next, Please1951-01-16The Less Deceived
Night-Music1944-10-12The North Ship
No Road1950-10-28The Less Deceived
None of the books have time...1960-01-01Collected Poems 1988
The North Ship1944-10-08The North Ship
Nothing significant was really said...1940-03 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Nothing To Be Said1961-10-18The Whitsun Weddings
Nursery Tale1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Observation1941-11-22Collected Poems 2003
Oils[2]1950-03-14Collected Poems 2003
The Old Fools1973-01-12High Windows
On Being Twenty-Six1949-05 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
One man walking a deserted platform...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Out in the lane I pause...1940-12 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Party Politics1984-01 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
Past days of gales...1945-11-17Collected Poems 1988
Pigeons1955-12-27Collected Poems 2003
Places, Loved Ones1954-10-10The Less Deceived
Plymouth1945-06-25Collected Poems 2003
Poem about Oxford (for Monica)1970 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Poetry of Departures1954-01-23The Less Deceived
Portrait1945-11-07Collected Poems 2003
Posterity1968-06-17High Windows
Pour away that youth...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Reasons for Attendance1953-12-30The Less Deceived
Reference Back1955-08-21The Whitsun Weddings
Sad Steps1968-04-24High Windows
The School in August1943 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Schoolmaster1940 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Scratch on the scratchpad...1966-07-19Collected Poems 1988
Self's the Man1958-05-05The Whitsun Weddings
Send No Money1962-08-21The Whitsun Weddings
Show Saturday1973-12-03High Windows
Since the majority of me...1950-12-06Collected Poems 2003
Sinking like sediment through the day...1949-05-13Collected Poems 1988
Skin1954-04-05The Less Deceived
A slight relax of air where cold was...1962-01-13Collected Poems 1988
So through that unripe day you bore your head...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
So you have been, despite parental ban...1940-03 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Solar1964-11-04High Windows
The Spirit Wooed1950 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Spring1950-05-19The Less Deceived
Spring Warning1940–04 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb1943-06 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
Story1941-02-13Collected Poems 2003
Strangers1950-05-20Collected Poems 1988
Street Lamps1939-09 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
A Study of Reading Habits1960-08-20The Whitsun Weddings
Success Story1954-03-11Collected Poems 2003
Summer Nocturne1939 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Sunny Prestatyn1962-10 (best known date)The Whitsun Weddings
Sympathy in White Major1967-08-31High Windows
Take One Home for the Kiddies1960-08-13The Whitsun Weddings
Talking in Bed1960-08-10The Whitsun Weddings
Thaw1946-12 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
The local snivels through the fields...1951 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
There is no language of destruction...1940 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
This Be The Verse1971-04 (best known date)High Windows
This is the first thing...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
This was your place of birth, this daytime palace...1942-02-28The North Ship
Time and Space were only their disguises...1941-04 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
To a Very Slow Air1946-09-29Collected Poems 1988
To Failure1949-05-18Collected Poems 1988
To My Wife1951-03-19Collected Poems 1988
To put one brick upon another...1951 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
To the Sea1969-10 (best known date)High Windows
To write one song, I said...1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Toads1954-03-16The Less Deceived
Toads Revisited1962-10 (best known date)The Whitsun Weddings
Tops1953-10-24Collected Poems 2003
Träumerei1946-09-27Collected Poems 1988
The Trees1967-06-02High Windows
Triple Time1953-10-03The Less Deceived
Two Guitar Pieces1946-09-18Collected Poems 1988
Ugly Sister1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Under a splendid chestnut tree...1950-06 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Ultimatum1940-06 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
Unfinished Poem1951 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Vers de Société1971-05-19High Windows
The View1972-08 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair...[3]1947-12-15The North Ship
Wants1950-06-01The Less Deceived
Water1954-04-06The Whitsun Weddings
We met at the end of the party...[4]1976-02 (best known date)Uncollected[4]
We see the spring breaking across rough stone...1939 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
Wedding-Wind1946-09-26The Less Deceived
Whatever Happened1953-10-26The Less Deceived
Who whistled for the wind, that it should break...1945-12-15Collected Poems 1988
Why did I dream of you last night?...1939 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
When first we touched, and touching showed...1975-12-20Collected Poems 1988
When the night puts twenty veils...1939-09 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
When the Russian tanks roll westward...1969-03 (best known date)Collected Poems 2003
The Whitsun Weddings1958-10-18The Whitsun Weddings
Who called love conquering...1950-07-17Collected Poems 2003
Wild Oats1962-05-12The Whitsun Weddings
Winter1944 (best known date)The North Ship
Winter Nocturne1938 (best known date)Collected Poems 1988
The Winter Palace1978-11-01Collected Poems 1988
Within the dream you said...1944-10-12The North Ship
Wires1950-11-04The Less Deceived
A Writer1941-05-08Collected Poems 2003