Poet Joy Harjo and Select Poems

Beyond

by Joy Harjo

Beyond sunrise, there is a song we follow

Beyond clouds traveling with rain humped
On their back, lightning in their fists
Beyond the blue horizon where our ancestors
Appear bearing gifts, wrapped in blankets woven
With sun and strands of scarlet time

Beyond the footpaths we walk every day
From sunrise to kitchen, to work, to garden, to play
To sunset, to dark, and back

Beyond where the baby sleeps, her breath
A light mist of happiness making
A fine rainbow of becoming knowledgable around us . . . .

In the song of beyond, how deep we are —

— Joy Harjo, from “Beyond” in An American Sunrise

* * * * * * * *

Amazon link

An American Sunrise

by Joy Harjo

In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.

Review of American Sunrise

 by Laura Eve Engel

“The indigenous peoples who are making their way up from the southern hemisphere are a continuation of the Trail of Tears. May we all find the way home.” So opens the Poet Laureate of the United States’ ninth collection, bringing President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act and the violent displacement of Native peoples into dialogue with present-day treatment of immigrants by the current administration. Reflecting upon her tribal heritage and ancestral narratives, Harjo’s poems are marked by generosity, sharing with an empathetic reader their earnest resilience: “Gather strength, pull it in / Be right where you are.” These poems take care to remind us that “None of us is above the other / In this story of forever.” Here, memory is more omnipresent than linear, where what’s past is a constant and tangible presence, and “we are surprised by a herd of colored horses breaking through time. / [...] We breathe hard with them / As if we are running through time with them.” Indeed, poems like “Exile of Memory” offer images of 1800s-era forced migration that echo today’s news from detention camps along the border: “They were bathed in pesticides / And now clean, given prayers in a foreign language to recite / As they were lined up to sleep alone in their army-issued cages.” Informed by a long memory and an urgent message, these poems mourn the loss of an old and driven-away song, even as they sing it back it into being.

* * * * * * * *

Poet Joy Harjo

Biography

Joy Harjo (1951–  )

poets.org link

United States Poet Laureate, 2019-2022

Joy Harjo was appointed the United States poet laureate in June 2019, and is the first Native American poet laureate in the history of the position. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 9, 1951, Harjo is a member of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She received a BA from the University of New Mexico before earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1978.

Harjo is a poet, musician, and playwright. She is the author of several books of poetry, including An American Sunrise (W. W. Norton, 2019); The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (W. W. Norton, 1994), which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; and In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her memoir Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton, 2012) won the 2013 PEN Center USA literary award for creative nonfiction. Harjo has also published collections of interviews and conversations, children's books, and collaborative art texts.

In 2015, she received the Wallace Stevens Award for proven mastery in the art of poetry from the Academy of American Poets. About Harjo, Chancellor Alicia Ostiker said, “Throughout her extraordinary career as poet, storyteller, musician, memoirist, playwright and activist, Joy Harjo has worked to expand our American language, culture, and soul. A Creek Indian and student of First Nation history, Harjo is rooted simultaneously in the natural world, in earth—especially the landscape of the American southwest—and in the spirit world. Aided by these redemptive forces of nature and spirit, incorporating native traditions of prayer and myth into a powerfully contemporary idiom, her visionary justice-seeking art transforms personal and collective bitterness to beauty, fragmentation to wholeness, and trauma to healing.”

Also a performer, Harjo plays saxophone and flutes with the Arrow Dynamics Band and solo, and previously with the band Poetic Justice. She has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam in venues across the U.S. and internationally and has released four award-winning albums. In 2009, she won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year.

In 2015, Harjo gave The Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics, which is offered annually in New York City by a prominent poet, called “Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigenous Poetry and Poets.” Her other honors include the 2019 Jackson Poetry Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, and the 2022 Academy of American Poets Leadership Award in poetry. She has also received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2019, Harjo was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. On this occasion, Academy Chancellor Marilyn Chin said “[Joy] is an iconic and beloved multi-genre artist. Her poetry, prose, and music have delighted, informed, and tantalized an international audience for over four decades. Her poetry displays a strong commitment to her social and political ideals as she fights tirelessly for Native American justice, ending violence against women, and a variety of important issues. Her masterful spiritual grace always shines through with compassion and forgiveness. Her poetry is a timeless gift to the world.”

In addition to serving as U.S. Poet Laureate, Harjo directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for young Mvskoke women, and is a founding board member of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She was the guest editor for Poem-a-Day in April 2020 and was appointed Bob Dylan Center Artist-in-Residence in 2022. Harjo lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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13 poems by Joy Harjo

article link

The work of Joy Harjo (Mvskoke, Tulsa, Oklahoma) challenges every attempt at introduction. Singer, saxofonist, poet, performer, dramatist, and storyteller are just a few of her roles. Somewhere between jazz and ceremonial flute, the beat of her sensibility radiates hope and gratitude to readers and listeners alike. For example, from Harjo we learn that the opposite of love is not hate, but fear. Several of her books, such as How We Became Human, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and She Had Some Horses are now classics in both English and World Indigenous Literature. Harjo has recorded five original albums, including the outstanding Winding Through the Milky Way with which she won the 2009 Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Woman Artist of the Year. The first 8 poems in this selection are from her book, Conflict Resolution from Holy Beings (2015). The remaining 5 poems are from earlier works and have not been previously translated into Spanish. We are grateful to the poet for allowing us to translate her work here. (Andrea Echeverría y Juan G. Sánchez Martínez)

⁂

For Calling The Spirit Back

From Wandering The Earth

In Its Human Feet

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that

bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel
the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and
back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were
a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time,
who will be there after time.
They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people
who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought
down upon them.

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few
years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and
leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the
thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning
by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call yourself back. You will find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return
in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be
happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and
given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who
loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no
place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

⁂

Rabbit Is Up to Tricks

In a world long before this one, there was enough for
everyone,
Until somebody got out of line.
We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the
wind.
Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play
with him;
He was lonely in this world.
So Rabbit thought to make a person.
And when he blew into the mouth of that crude figure to see
What would happen,
The clay man stood up.
Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken.
The clay man obeyed.
Then Rabbit showed him how to steal corn.
The clay man obeyed.
Then he showed him how to steal someone else’s wife.
The clay man obeyed.
Rabbit felt important and powerful.
The clay man felt important and powerful.
And once that clay man started he could not stop.
Once he took that chicken he wanted all the chickens.
And once he took that corn he wanted all the corn.
And once he took that wife, he wanted all the wives.
He was insatiable.
Then he had a taste of gold and he wanted all the gold.
Then it was land and anything else he saw.
His wanting only made him want more.
Soon it was countries, and then it was trade.
The wanting infected the earth.
We lost track of the purpose and reason for life.
We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories.
We could no longer see or hear our ancestors,
Or talk with each other across the kitchen table.
Forests were being mowed down all over the world.
And Rabbit had no place to play.
Rabbit’s trick had backfired.
Rabbit tried to call the clay man back,
But when the clay man wouldn’t listen
Rabbit realized he’d made a clay man with no ears.

© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

⁂

In Mystic

My path is a cross of burning trees,
Lit by crows carrying fire in their beaks.
I ask the guardians of these lands for permission to enter.
I am a visitor to this history.
No one remembers to ask anymore, they answer.
What do I expect in this New England seaport town, near
      the birthplace of democracy,
Where I am a ghost?
Even a casino can’t make an Indian real.
Or should I say “native,” or “savage,” or “demon”?
And with what trade language?
I am trading a backwards look for jeopardy.
I agree with the ancient European maps.
There are monsters beyond imagination that troll the waters.
The Puritan’s determined ships did fall off the edge of the
     world . . .
I am happy to smell the sea,
Walk the narrow winding streets of shops and restaurants,
and delight in the company of friends, trees, and small
     winds.
I would rather not speak with history but history came to me.
It was dark before daybreak when the fire sparked.
The men left on a hunt from the Pequot village here where I
      stand.
The women and children left behind were set afire.
I do not want to know this, but my gut knows the language
      of bloodshed.
Over six hundred were killed, to establish a home for God’s
      people, crowed the Puritan leaders in their Sunday
      sermons.
And then history was gone in a betrayal of smoke.
There is still burning though we live in a democracy erected
over the burial ground.
This was given to me to speak.
Every poem is an effort at ceremony.
I asked for a way in.

(For Pam Uschuk) October 31, 2009
© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

⁂

Once the World Was Perfect

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.
Then we took it for granted.
Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.
Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.
And once Doubt ruptured the web,
All manner of demon thoughts
Jumped through—
We destroyed the world we had been given
For inspiration, for life—
Each stone of jealousy, each stone
Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.
No one was without a stone in his or her hand.
There we were,
Right back where we had started.
We were bumping into each other
In the dark.
And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know
How to live with each other.
Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another
And shared a blanket.
A spark of kindness made a light.
The light made an opening in the darkness.
Everyone worked together to make a ladder.
A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,
And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,
And their children, all the way through time—
To now, into this morning light to you.

© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

⁂

Talking with the Sun

I believe in the sun.
In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed, and
forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.
When explorers first encountered my people, they called us
heathens, sun worshippers.
They didn’t understand that the sun is a relative, and
illuminates our path on this earth.

After dancing all night in a circle we realize that we are a part of a larger sense of stars and planets dancing with us overhead.
When the sun rises at the apex of the ceremony, we are renewed.
There is no mistaking this connection, though Walmart might be just down the road.
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of meaning.

Our earth is shifting. We can all see it.
I hear from my Inuit and Yupik relatives up north that
everything has changed. It’s so hot; there is not enough
winter.
Animals are confused. Ice is melting.
The quantum physicists have it right; they are beginning to think like Indians: everything is connected dynamically at an intimate level.
When you remember this, then the current wobble of the earth makes sense. How much more oil can be drained,
Without replacement; without reciprocity?

I walked out of a hotel room just off Times Square at dawn to find the sun.
It was the fourth morning since the birth of my fourth granddaughter.
This was the morning I was to present her to the sun, as a relative, as one of us. It was still dark, overcast as I walked through Times Square.
I stood beneath a twenty-first century totem pole of symbols of multinational corporations, made of flash and neon.

The sun rose up over the city but I couldn’t see it amidst the rain.
Though I was not at home, bundling up the baby to carry her outside,
I carried this newborn girl within the cradleboard of my heart.
I held her up and presented her to the sun, so she would be recognized as a relative,
So that she won’t forget this connection, this promise, So that we all remember, the sacredness of life.

© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

⁂

Suicide Watch

1.
I was on a train stopped sporadically at checkpoints.
What tribe are you, what nation, what race, what sex, what unworthy soul?

2.
I could not sleep, because I could not wake up.
No mirror could give me back what I wanted.

3.
I was given a drug to help me sleep.
Then another drug to wake up.
Then a drug was given to me to make me happy.
They all made me sadder.

4.
Death will gamble with anyone.
There are many fools down here who believe they will win.

5.
You know, said my teacher, you can continue to wallow, or
You can stand up here with me in the sunlight and watch the battle.

6.
I sat across from a girl whose illness wanted to jump over to me.
No! I said, but not aloud.
I would have been taken for crazy.

7.
We will always become those we have ever judged or condemned.

8.
This is not mine. It belongs to the soldiers who raped the young women on the Trail of Tears. It belongs to Andrew Jackson. It belongs to the missionaries. It belongs to the thieves of our language. It belongs to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It no longer belongs to me.

9.
I became fascinated by the dance of dragonflies over the river.
I found myself first there.

© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

⁂

You Can Change the Story,

My Spirit Said to Me as I Sat Near the Sea

For Sharon Oard Warner and DG Nanouk Okpik

I am in a village up north, in the lands named “Alaska” now. These places had their own names long before English, Russian, or any other politically imposed trade language.

It is in the times when people dreamed and thought together as one being. That doesn’t mean there weren’t individuals. In those times, people were more individual in personhood than they are now in their common assertion of individuality: one person kept residence on the moon even while living in the village. Another was a man who dressed up and lived as a woman and was known as the best seamstress.

I have traveled to this village with a close friend who is also a distant relative. We are related to nearly everyone by marriage, clan, or blood.

The first night after our arrival, a woman is brutally killed in the village. Murder is not commonplace. The evil of it puts the whole village at risk. It has to be dealt with immediately so that the turbulence will not leave the people open to more evil.

Because my friend and I are the most obvious influence, it
is decided that we are to be killed, to satisfy the murder, to ensure the village will continue in a harmonious manner. No one tells us we are going to be killed. We know it; my bones know it. It is unfortunate, but it is how things must be.

The next morning, my friend and I have walked down from the village to help gather, when we hear the killing committee coming for us.
I can hear them behind us, with their implements and stones, in their psychic roar of purpose.
I know they are going to kill us. I thank the body that has been my clothing on this journey. It has served me well for protection and enjoyment.
I hear—I still hear—the crunch of bones as the village mob, sent to do this job, slams us violently. It’s not personal for most of them. A few gain pleasure.
I feel my body’s confused and terrible protest, then my spirit leaps out above the scene and I watch briefly before circling toward the sea.

I linger out over the sea, and my soul’s helper who has been with me through the stories of my being says, “You can go back and change the story.”

My first thought was, Why would I want to do that? I am free of the needs of earth existence. I can move like wind and water. But then, because I am human, not bird or whale, I feel compelled.
“What do you mean, ‘change the story’?”
Then I am back in the clothes of my body outside the village. I am back in the time between the killing in the village and my certain death in retribution.

“Now what am I supposed to do?” I ask my Spirit. I can see no other way to proceed through the story.

My Spirit responds, “You know what to do. Look, and you will see the story.”

And then I am alone with the sea and the sky. I give my thinking to time and let them go play.

It is then I see. I see a man in the village stalk a woman. She is not interested in him, but he won’t let go. He stalks her as he stalks a walrus. He is the village’s best hunter of walrus. He stalks her to her home, and when no one else is there, he trusses her as if she were a walrus, kills her and drags her body out of her house to the sea. I can see the trail of blood behind them. I can see his footprints in blood as he returns to the village alone.

I am in the village with my friend. The people are gathering and talking about the killing. I can feel their nudges toward my friend and I. I stand up with a drum in my hand. I say:

“I have a story I want to tell you.”

And then I begin drumming and dancing to accompany the story. It is pleasing, and the people want to hear more.
They want to hear what kind of story I am bringing from my village.
I sing, dance, and tell the story of a walrus hunter. He is the best walrus hunter of a village.

I sing about his relationship to the walrus, and how he has fed his people. And how skilled he is as he walks out onto the ice to call out the walrus.

And then I tell the story of the killing of a walrus who is like a woman. I talk about the qualities of the woman, whom the man sees as a walrus. By now, the story has its own spirit that wants to live. It dances and sings and breathes. It surprises me with what it knows.

With the last step, the last hit of the drum, the killer stands up, as if to flee the gathering. The people turn together as one and see him. They see that he has killed the woman, and it is his life that must be taken to satisfy the murder.

When I return to present earth time, I can still hear the singing.
I get up from my bed and dance and sing the story.
It is still in my tongue, my body, as if it has lived there all along,
though I am in a city with many streams of peoples from far and wide across the earth.

We make a jumble of stories. We do not dream together.

© Joy Harjo. Conflict Resolution From Holy Beings. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

⁂

Morning Prayers

I have missed the guardian spirit
of Sangre de Cristos,
those mountains
against which I destroyed myself
every morning I was sick
with loving and fighting
in those small years.
In that season I looked up
to a blue conception of faith
a notion of the sacred in
the elegant border of cedar trees
becoming mountain and sky.

This is how we were born into the world:
Sky fell in love with earth, wore turquoise,
cantered in on a black horse.
Earth dressed herself fragrantly,
with regard for aesthetics of holy romance.
Their love decorated the mountains with sunrise,
weaved valleys delicate with the edging of sunset.

This morning I look toward the east
and I am lonely for those mountains
Though I’ve said good-bye to the girl
with her urgent prayers for redemption.

I used to believe in a vision
that would save the people
carry us all to the top of the mountain
during the flood
of human destruction.

I know nothing anymore
as I place my feet into the next world
except this:
the nothingness
is vast and stunning,
brims with details
of steaming, dark coffee
ashes of campfires
the bells on yaks or sheep
sirens careening through a deluge
of humans
or the dead carried through fire,
through the mist of baking sweet
bread and breathing.

This is how we will leave this world:
on horses of sunrise and sunset
from the shadow of the mountains
who witnessed every battle
every small struggle.

⁂

This land is a poem

This land is a poem of ochre and burnt sand I could never write,
unless paper were the sacrament of sky, and ink the broken line of
wild horses staggering the horizon several miles away. Even then,
does anything written ever matter to the earth, wind, and sky?

⁂

Anything that matters

Anything that matters is here. Anything that will continue to matter
in the next several thousand years will continue to be here.
Approaching in the distance is the child you were some years ago.
See her laughing as she chases a white butterfly.

⁂

Don’t bother the earth spirit

Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a
story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing.
If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you
warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this
is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, light-
ning, the deaths of all you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s
a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she
traps you. See the stone finger over there? That is the only one
who ever escaped.

⁂

Fire

a woman can’t survive
by her own breath
                  alone
she must know
the voices of mountains
she must recognize
the foreverness of blue sky
she must flow
with the elusive
bodies
of night winds
who will take her
into herself

look at me
i am not a separate woman
i am a continuance
of blue sky
i am the throat
of the mountains
a night wind
who burns
with every breath
she takes

© Joy Harjo. What Moon Drove Me to This? 1980.

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.

Additional Collection of Youtube Vids - Philip Larkin

Faith Healing

BY PHILIP LARKIN

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

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Philip Larkin CH CBE FRSL
Photograph by Fay Godwin (1970)
Born	Philip Arthur Larkin 9 August 1922 Coventry, England
Died	2 December 1985 (aged 63) Kingston upon Hull, England
Resting place	Cottingham municipal cemetery 53°47′00.98″N 0°25′50.19″W
Monuments	Bronze statue, Martin Jennings (2010), Hull Paragon Interchange Station
Alma mater	St John's College, Oxford
Occupation	Poet, librarian, novelist, jazz critic
Employer	University 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. 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]

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This Be The Verse

BY PHILIP LARKIN

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?

article link

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

BY PHILIP LARKIN

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

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-larkin

B I O G R AP H Y

1922-1985

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

BY PHILIP LARKIN

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

BY PHILIP LARKIN

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

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

• The North Ship (July 1945)
• The Less Deceived (November 1955, dated October)
• The Whitsun Weddings (February 1964)
• High Windows (June 1974)

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

See also: Category:Poetry by Philip Larkin

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 title	Completion date	Book
Absences	1950-11-28	The Less Deceived
Administration	1965-03-03	Collected Poems 1988
After-Dinner Remarks	1940-06 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Afternoons	1959-09 (best known date)	The Whitsun Weddings
Age	1954-05-26	The Less Deceived
All catches alight... (to Bruce Montgomery)	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Ambulances	1961-01-10	The Whitsun Weddings
An April Sunday brings the snow...	1948-04-04	Collected Poems 1988
An Arundel Tomb	1956-02-20	The Whitsun Weddings
And now the leaves suddenly lose strength...	1961-11-03	Collected Poems 1988
And the wave sings because it is moving...	1946-09-14	Collected Poems 1988
Annus Mirabilis	1967-06-16	High Windows
Ape Experiment Room	1965-02-24	Collected Poems 1988
Arrival	1950 (best known date)	Collected Poems 2003
Arrivals, Departures	1953-01-24	The Less Deceived
As a war in years of peace...	1940 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
As Bad as a Mile	1960-02-09	The Whitsun Weddings
At Grass	1950-01-03	The Less Deceived
At the chiming of light upon sleep...	1946-10-04	Collected Poems 1988
At thirty-one, when some are rich... (unfinished)	1953-08 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Aubade	1977-11-29	Collected Poems 1988
Autobiography at an Air-Station	1953-12-06	Collected Poems 1988
Autumn	1953-10 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Autumn has caught us in our summer wear...	1939 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Best Society	1951 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Born Yesterday (for Sally Amis)	1954-01-20	The Less Deceived
The bottle is drunk out by one...	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Breadfruit	1961-11-19	Collected Poems 2003
Bridge for the Living	1975–12 (best known date)	Collected Poems 2003
Broadcast	1961-11-06	The Whitsun Weddings
The Building	1972-02-09	High Windows
By day, a lifted study-storehouse...	1983-10 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
The Card-Players	1970-05-06	High Windows
Church Going	1954-07-28	The Less Deceived
Climbing the hill within the deafening wind...	1944-10-23	The North Ship
Come then to prayers...	1946-05-13	Collected Poems 1988
Coming	1950-02-25	The Less Deceived
Coming at last to night's most thankful springs...	1945-03-01	Collected Poems 1988
Compline	1950-02-12	Collected Poems 1988
Conscript (for James Ballard Sutton)	1941-10 (best known date)	The North Ship
Continuing to Live	1954-04-24	Collected Poems 2003
Counting	1955–09 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Cut Grass	1971-06-03	High Windows
The daily things we do...	1979-02 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
The Dance (unfinished)	1964-05-12	Collected Poems 1988
The Dancer	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Dawn	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Days	1953-08-03	The Whitsun Weddings
Dear Charles, My Muse, asleep or dead...	1982 (best known date)	Collected Poems 2003
Deceptions	1950-02-20	The Less Deceived
The Dedicated	1946-09-18	Collected Poems 2003
Deep Analysis	1946-04 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Disintegration	1942-02 (best known date)	Collected Poems 2003
Dockery and Son	1963-03-28	The Whitsun Weddings
Dry–Point[1]	1950-03-17	The Less Deceived
Dublinesque	1970-06-06	High Windows
Essential Beauty	1962-06-26	The Whitsun Weddings
The Explosion	1970-01-05	High Windows
Faith Healing	1960-05-10	The Whitsun Weddings
Far Out	1959-02-01	Collected Poems 1988
Femmes Damnées	1943 (best known date)	Collected Poems 2003
Fiction and the Reading Public	1950-02-25	Collected Poems 2003
First Sight	1956-03-03	The Whitsun Weddings
For Sidney Bechet	1954-01-15	The Whitsun Weddings
Forget What Did	1971-08-06	High Windows
Fragment from May	1938 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel	1966-05-20	High Windows
Gathering Wood	1954-03-25	Collected Poems 1988
Going	1946–02 (best known date)	The Less Deceived
Going, Going	1972-01-25	High Windows
Good for you, Gavin...	1981-11-26	Collected 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.)	1953-01-29	Collected Poems 1988
Heads in the Women's Ward	1972-03-06	Collected Poems 2003
Heaviest of flowers, the head...	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Here	1961-10-08	The Whitsun Weddings
High Windows	1967-02-12	High Windows
The hills in their recumbent postures...	1940-03 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Homage to a Government	1969-01-10	High Windows
Home is so Sad	1958-12-31	The Whitsun Weddings
The horns of the morning...	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Hospital Visits	1953-12-04	Collected Poems 1988
The house on the edge of the serious wood...	1941-04 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
How	1970-04-10	Collected Poems 2003
How Distant	1965-11-24	High Windows
How to Sleep	1950-03-10	Collected Poems 1988
I am washed upon a rock...	1949-03-19	Collected Poems 1988
I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land	1943 (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 Remember	1954-01-08	The Less Deceived
If grief could burn out...	1944-10-05	The 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 Darling	1950-05-23	The Less Deceived
Ignorance	1955-09-11	The Whitsun Weddings
In times when nothing stood...	1978-03-02	Collected Poems 2003
The Importance of Elsewhere	1955-06-13	The 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 Store	1961-06-18	The Whitsun Weddings
Last Will and Testament	1940-09 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Latest Face	1951-02 (best known date)	The Less Deceived
Letter to a Friend about Girls	1959-12 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
The Life with a Hole in it	1974-08-08	Collected Poems 2003
Lift through the breaking day...	1945-08-27	Collected Poems 1988
Like the train's beat...	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album	1953-09-18	The Less Deceived
The Literary World	1950-03-20	Collected Poems 1988
The little lives of earth and form...	1977-05-06	Collected Poems 1988
Livings: I, II, III	1971-12-10	High Windows
Long Last	1963-02-03	Collected Poems 1988
Long lion days...	1982-07-21	Collected Poems 1988
Long roots moor summer to our side of earth...	1954-06-12	Collected Poems 1988
Long Sight in Age	1955-06-20	Collected Poems 1988
Love	1962-12-07	Collected Poems 2003
Love Again	1979-09-20	Collected Poems 1988
Love Songs in Age	1957-01-01	The Whitsun Weddings
Love, we must part now...	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
MCMXIV	1960-05-17	The Whitsun Weddings
Maiden Name	1955-01-15	The Less Deceived
Many famous feet have trod...	1946-10-15	Collected Poems 1988
The March Past	1951-05-25	Collected Poems 1988
Marriages	1951-06-12	Collected Poems 1988
Maturity	1951 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
May Weather	1941-06-05	Collected Poems 2003
Midsummer Night, 1940	1940-06 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Midwinter Waking	195401-27	Collected Poems 1988
Modesties	1949-05-13	Collected Poems 2003
Money	1973-02-19	High Windows
The moon is full tonight...	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Morning at last: there in the snow...	1976-02-01	Collected Poems 1988
Morning has spread again...	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Mother, Summer, I	1953-08 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
The Mower	1979-06-12	Collected Poems 2003
Mr Bleaney	1955-05 (best known date)	The Whitsun Weddings
Mythological Introduction	1943 (best known date)	Collected Poems 2003
Myxomatosis	1954 (best known date)	The Less Deceived
Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your Expenses	1961-02-22	The Whitsun Weddings
Negative Indicative (unfinished)	1953-12-28	Collected Poems 1988
Neurotics	1949-03 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
New eyes each year...	1979-02 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
New Year Poem	1940-12-31	Collected Poems 1988
Next, Please	1951-01-16	The Less Deceived
Night-Music	1944-10-12	The North Ship
No Road	1950-10-28	The Less Deceived
None of the books have time...	1960-01-01	Collected Poems 1988
The North Ship	1944-10-08	The North Ship
Nothing significant was really said...	1940-03 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Nothing To Be Said	1961-10-18	The Whitsun Weddings
Nursery Tale	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Observation	1941-11-22	Collected Poems 2003
Oils[2]	1950-03-14	Collected Poems 2003
The Old Fools	1973-01-12	High Windows
On Being Twenty-Six	1949-05 (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 Politics	1984-01 (best known date)	Collected Poems 2003
Past days of gales...	1945-11-17	Collected Poems 1988
Pigeons	1955-12-27	Collected Poems 2003
Places, Loved Ones	1954-10-10	The Less Deceived
Plymouth	1945-06-25	Collected Poems 2003
Poem about Oxford (for Monica)	1970 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Poetry of Departures	1954-01-23	The Less Deceived
Portrait	1945-11-07	Collected Poems 2003
Posterity	1968-06-17	High Windows
Pour away that youth...	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Reasons for Attendance	1953-12-30	The Less Deceived
Reference Back	1955-08-21	The Whitsun Weddings
Sad Steps	1968-04-24	High Windows
The School in August	1943 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Schoolmaster	1940 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Scratch on the scratchpad...	1966-07-19	Collected Poems 1988
Self's the Man	1958-05-05	The Whitsun Weddings
Send No Money	1962-08-21	The Whitsun Weddings
Show Saturday	1973-12-03	High Windows
Since the majority of me...	1950-12-06	Collected Poems 2003
Sinking like sediment through the day...	1949-05-13	Collected Poems 1988
Skin	1954-04-05	The Less Deceived
A slight relax of air where cold was...	1962-01-13	Collected 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
Solar	1964-11-04	High Windows
The Spirit Wooed	1950 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Spring	1950-05-19	The Less Deceived
Spring Warning	1940–04 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb	1943-06 (best known date)	Collected Poems 2003
Story	1941-02-13	Collected Poems 2003
Strangers	1950-05-20	Collected Poems 1988
Street Lamps	1939-09 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
A Study of Reading Habits	1960-08-20	The Whitsun Weddings
Success Story	1954-03-11	Collected Poems 2003
Summer Nocturne	1939 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Sunny Prestatyn	1962-10 (best known date)	The Whitsun Weddings
Sympathy in White Major	1967-08-31	High Windows
Take One Home for the Kiddies	1960-08-13	The Whitsun Weddings
Talking in Bed	1960-08-10	The Whitsun Weddings
Thaw	1946-12 (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 Verse	1971-04 (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...	1942-02-28	The North Ship
Time and Space were only their disguises...	1941-04 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
To a Very Slow Air	1946-09-29	Collected Poems 1988
To Failure	1949-05-18	Collected Poems 1988
To My Wife	1951-03-19	Collected Poems 1988
To put one brick upon another...	1951 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
To the Sea	1969-10 (best known date)	High Windows
To write one song, I said...	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Toads	1954-03-16	The Less Deceived
Toads Revisited	1962-10 (best known date)	The Whitsun Weddings
Tops	1953-10-24	Collected Poems 2003
Träumerei	1946-09-27	Collected Poems 1988
The Trees	1967-06-02	High Windows
Triple Time	1953-10-03	The Less Deceived
Two Guitar Pieces	1946-09-18	Collected Poems 1988
Ugly Sister	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Under a splendid chestnut tree...	1950-06 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Ultimatum	1940-06 (best known date)	Collected Poems 2003
Unfinished Poem	1951 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Vers de Société	1971-05-19	High Windows
The View	1972-08 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair...[3]	1947-12-15	The North Ship
Wants	1950-06-01	The Less Deceived
Water	1954-04-06	The 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-Wind	1946-09-26	The Less Deceived
Whatever Happened	1953-10-26	The Less Deceived
Who whistled for the wind, that it should break...	1945-12-15	Collected Poems 1988
Why did I dream of you last night?...	1939 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
When first we touched, and touching showed...	1975-12-20	Collected 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 Weddings	1958-10-18	The Whitsun Weddings
Who called love conquering...	1950-07-17	Collected Poems 2003
Wild Oats	1962-05-12	The Whitsun Weddings
Winter	1944 (best known date)	The North Ship
Winter Nocturne	1938 (best known date)	Collected Poems 1988
The Winter Palace	1978-11-01	Collected Poems 1988
Within the dream you said...	1944-10-12	The North Ship
Wires	1950-11-04	The Less Deceived
A Writer	1941-05-08	Collected Poems 2003