"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
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‘This was Mr Bleaney’s room. He stayed The whole time he was at the Bodies, till They moved him.’ Flowered curtains, thin and frayed, Fall to within five inches of the sill,
Whose window shows a strip of building land, Tussocky, littered. ‘Mr Bleaney took My bit of garden properly in hand.’ Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook
Behind the door, no room for books or bags – ‘I’ll take it.’ So it happens that I lie Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags On the same saucer-souvenir, and try
Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown The jabbering set he egged her on to buy. I know his habits – what time he came down, His preference for sauce to gravy, why
He kept on plugging at the four aways – Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk Who put him up for summer holidays, And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed Telling himself that this was home, and grinned, And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature, And at his age having no more to show Than one hired box should make him pretty sure He warranted no better, I don’t know.
*From "The Collected Poems" (Faber, 1993), by permission of the publisher, Faber & Faber Ltd. Recording used by permission of Mr. John Weeks. Poem featured in the Poetry Archive's BBC 100 Collection.
"Mr Bleaney" is a poem by British poet Philip Larkin, written in May 1955. It was first published in The Listener on 8 September 1955 and later included in Larkin's 1964 anthology The Whitsun Weddings.
The speaker in the poem is renting a room and compares his situation to that of its previous occupant, a Mr Bleaney.
Larkin had previously used the surname Bleaney in his first novel Jill in 1946, where Bleaney is named as a classmate of the hero, John Kemp, at "Huddlesford Grammar School", somewhere in Lancashire. But the reader is not told his Christian name or indeed anything else about him. There is nothing to indicate that this is the same Bleaney who eventually occupies the room described in Larkin's poem.
Structure
The poem comprises seven four-line stanzas with a regular rhyme pattern of ABAB. The last sentence spans two stanzas:
But if he stood and watched the frigid wind Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed Telling himself that this was home, and grinned, And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature, And at his age having no more to show Than one hired box should make him pretty sure He warranted no better, I don't know.[1]
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. Auden, W. 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]
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.
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)
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.”
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]
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.
