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]

* * * * * * * *

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

Marcel, the Shell with Shoes - 2022 Reviews & Quotes + Early Marcel Vids 2010,2011,2014

 

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Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

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Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Part 1

2010

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Part 2

2011

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Part 3

2014

* * * * * * *

The Reason ‘Marcel the Shell With

Shoes On’ Will Absolutely Destroy You

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NO, NOW YOU’RE CRYING: When our beloved wise-cracking mollusk first went viral, we were at an internet crossroads. We clearly chose the wrong path. The glorious (devastating) new film shows us why.

Justin Kirkland

Published Jul. 01, 2022

Marcel (the Shell (with Shoes On)) found his way to me during sophomore year of college, back when being online didn’t feel like such a chore.

I think it was around 2011. My friend pulled up this video featuring a stop-motion shell equipped with one large googly eye and, naturally, shoes. We watched the video, commented on how many people had seen it, and wrote it off. But throughout the rest of that spring–which turned out to be one hell of a terrible semester–I kept going back to it. Life sucked in that specific way that life is terrible for a 20-year-old, and as it turned out, the remedy was always more shell. So on nights where I’d decided to simply blow off homework, I’d dive into YouTube, eat Domino’s pizza and drink whiskey from a plastic bottle, and find my way, eventually, to Marcel.

I feel like over the years people have told me that’s what Marcel became for them, too: a palm-sized, quirky salve whose debut marked this peculiar crux of the internet’s history before the World Wide Web felt so perpetually toxic.

The original short film-turned-YouTube video from Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate amassed over 32 million views–a bona fide viral video when that kind of thing was still impressive. It spawned two short sequels, and then eventually, we didn’t hear from Marcel anymore. Twelve years went by. 4chan devolved into 8chan (yikes) and TikTok replaced Vine. Social media became an opinion cesspool and the likes of Marcel didn’t seem to have much of a place in the culture anymore, relegated to wherever Charlie the Unicorn and Philosoraptor exist.

Then, in the chaos of 2022, A24 announced that it would be releasing a feature-length mockumentary titled Marcel the Shell with Shoes On from Fleischer-Camp. For the die-hard fans, that was terrible news because there’s a certain cringe that often comes along with pulling the past into the present (see: Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Will & Grace, Fear Factor’s Joe Rogan). If anyone should avoid 2022, it’s the perpetually earnest and optimistic Marcel the Shell.

The original Marcel the Shell video appeared online at a time that felt like a fork in the road. Marcel is the road we did not travel. We opted instead for something harsher and vitriolic. We lost the good faith that Marcel encapsulated.

In a bittersweet twist, Marcel the Shell, as we know him, does not come back. Or rather, it’s not all we see of him. Instead of recreating the past, the film recognizes that no matter which viral fame you’ve achieved–the pure one of 2010 or the infamous one of 2022–there’s a life that’s happening on the other side of the screen.

In the 10 years or so since we last saw Marcel, we discover that the two people whose house he lives in have since separated (a presumed nod to the 2016 divorce between Fleischer-Camp and Slate, both of whom, excitedly, returned for the film). In the wake of their departure, Marcel’s shell family has disappeared as well, except for his Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini).

In the film’s earlier scenes, we get callbacks and quotables from the original short film, but then the movie pivots. Nana Connie has what appears to be signs of dementia. On good days, she gets a bit lost. On bad ones, she gets hurt. Marcel, still squeaky and youthful, has fallen into the role of caregiver. She is insistent that he continues to live his life and find his missing family; he’s determined to stick by her side.

In the excitement of gaining internet fame, Marcel and Fleischer-Camp (who cameos in the film as the documentarian) go on a day-long search for Marcel’s family, but when they return, Marcel finds that all the fans who were inspired to help him are mostly interested in grabbing a selfie in front of the house. Dancing on TikTok. Posting something online as a braggy souvenir from when they doxxed Marcel. Worse, inside the house, the commotion has caused Nana Connie to fall and injure herself.

The short of it is that Marcel’s life isn’t quite as easy as it once looked online either. Like a lot of us, we look incredible via what we choose to share online. But when Marcel–and again, I’d like to recognize that we’re discussing a shell with a googly eye–is offered to us over the course of 98 minutes, life isn’t easy as it seemed to be in those three minute clips.

The film gets at the struggle that comes with grief, but more importantly, how easy it is to get trapped in the incompatible online version of ourselves. At one point in the film, Marcel questions Fleischer-Camp for not sharing any personal details about his life, saying, “You can connect with people when you’re not filming them.”

The moment underlines the entirety of the film–regardless of viral fame or the personas we build online, there’s always more going on than the internet suggests. And maybe the reason we lie about it all is because it feels like that’s our own escape. Or that we can create something better than what we’re living. Like Fleischer-Camp, it’s easier to post about what we’re seeing than it is to get into what plagues our day to day. But Marcel the Shell pushes past that. Marcel of 2010 showed us how pure life can be on the Internet. Marcel of 2022 shows us how pure it can be when you log off.

For those who’ve seen the film, you know that the whole story culminates in an interview with the fearless Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes–an offer Marcel initially declines for fear of drawing more attention to himself and endangering Nana Connie. Frustrated at Marcel for turning it down and refusing to accept the opportunity in front of him, she feigns a sudden reversal in health so that Marcel will do the interview. As he and Fleischer-Camp sit before Stahl and do their interview, Nana Connie sits in the window sill, recites “The Trees,” a poem by Philip Larkin, and then when the film cuts back, she is gone.

As Marcel tries to make sense of her death a few scenes later, he finds himself drawn to a cracked window. He turns to the camera and explains that he comes there to speak to Nana Connie. The air moving through the crack hits his shell and makes a dull whistle, and he says with a smile, “Suddenly we’re one large instrument.”

You’d think, 12 years into the future and squarely in my thirties, this wouldn’t hit me as hard as it might have in my plastic-bottled whiskey drinking days, but I was in the back of the theater, releasing those little mini breaths you run into when you’re trying not to emotionally explode in public. Between sniffs, I heard the fully adult man beside me choking back the same breaths. When the lights came up, I laughed and said, “I’m glad you were the one sitting beside me because I know that you got it,” and he said, “I thought the same thing about you, too.”

I’m not entirely sure what I meant by that–maybe that we were two grown men crying at a stop motion shell from the internet. Or that in the era of cynicism and skepticism, we allowed ourselves to cry at this earnest message about grief and life. I suspect it’s probably more in line with why I finally decided I was crying. A special piece of my life found a way to circle back to me a decade later. Not to wax nostalgic about the past but to find me where I needed it, at the same place I was.

And yeah, none of this would have come to be had Marcel not been extremely online. But the best part of Marcel’s story–the purest piece that I’ll carry with me–happened when he logged off.

* * * * * * *

The Trees

by Philip Larkin

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.

In Praise of the Simple Beauties

of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

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Olivia Rutigliano on the New Movie

about the Internet's Favorite Anthropomorphic Mollusk

by Olivia Rutigliano

July 1, 2022

This week, I saw a dear old friend at the movies and I am pleased to say that he seems better than ever.

I first became acquainted with the character known as “Marcel the Shell” in my college dorm room nearly a decade ago. My sister had sent me a link to a popular YouTube video, a short stop-motion film in which a tiny seashell with a googly eye and a pair of pink plastic sneakers takes a cameraman around the house where he resides—a giant house, a human’s house—and explains how he lives his miniature life.

He exists inventively, resourcefully. He scrounges for things that he might turn into tools and gadgets and furniture. “Guess what I use as a beanbag chair?” he asks the filmmaker capturing him. “A raisin.” He uses stray hairs as string, pretends a ball of lint is his pet dog. Most of the film is like this: a little vérité-style preview into this charming lifestyle which is a dilated, cobbled-together version of our own.

Crucially, this short—entitled Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and made by Dean Fleisher-Camp and Jenny Slate—is not about a little world as much as it is about a little life. The immense charms of Marcel’s handmade (shellmade?) surroundings are surpassed by the palpable spunk of its resident. Marcel is curious, sentimental, indefatigable, and a little bit sassy. He informs the camera, “Some people say my head is too big for my body… and I say… ‘compared to what?'”

Marcel is able to produce beauty in his world by seeing everyday objects in a different way, and so too does the film.

The original Marcel the Shell short, posted to YouTube in 2010, became a phenomenon. The lore is that Slate and Fleisher-Camp had created him accidentally—she produced the funny voice, and he built a model to match. Indeed, Slate speaks about the character not as something she and Fleisher-Camp created, but as a whole identity who was inside both of them and managed to manifest from them, like Athena climbing out fully grown from Zeus’s head or Aphrodite emerging as her adult self from, well, a shell. Marcel is his own person, a fully coherent individual, even to his creators.

In real life, Marcel drew crowds and fans for his cuteness but held onto them because of his unique perspective. The popularity of the initial short video generated several sequels and two children’s books. And now, 12 years later, he has finally made his feature film debut.

Directed by Dean-Fleisher Camp, co-written by Jenny Slate and Nick Paley, and produced by A24, this feature version, also entitled Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, revisits the last few years of Marcel content while also reworking it. The story is about Dean, a filmmaker, who finds a tiny sentient shell living in the Los Angeles Airbnb he’s staying in, and gets the idea to film his daily routine. Marcel lives with his loving grandmother, Nana Connie (Isabella Rosselini), and they spend their days gardening, talking, watching 60 Minutes on Sundays, and rigging contraptions to get basic things done. “It’s pretty much common knowledge that it takes at least 20 shells to have a community,” Marcel informs Dean. But it’s just him and Nana Connie in the house—the rest of their giant group has vanished (probably accidentally packed in a suitcase and taken away by the last couple to stay there).What results is a tender 89-minute film about the bonds that fortify our lives, from new friendships to intergenerational care.

In the film, the shorts that Dean has posted to YouTube make Marcel a kind of celebrity, and he decides to try to use his newfound notoriety to find his missing family. But his attentions are split between the longing to find his community and the desire to care for the one he already has: Nana Connie seems to be experiencing a kind of dementia, and Marcel, ever-loving, wants to use all his energy caring for her and keeping her safe. The life they live together is special and beautiful, and he doesn’t want to miss a minute of that.

What results is a tender 89-minute film about the bonds that fortify our lives, from new friendships to intergenerational care. 

Marcel wonders a lot about the different ways we connect to people; the discovery of the internet has him negotiating the difference between a community and an audience. Narratively, it is about what it means to build a life with someone, but it’s peppered with questions like these.

And thematically, of course, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On cannot help but be about our relationships to objects, too. So much of the film is about Marcel’s material life and his practical mindset: how he uses objects to make his life easier (for example, he climbs inside a tennis ball and uses it to traverse the house).

But it is also about how Marcel’s inch-tall perspective opens up the potential of objects and materials—not just pragmatically but aesthetically. Marcel is able to produce beauty in his world by seeing everyday objects in a different way, and so too does the film. Some of the most beautiful moments are simple, silent camera shots over the tiny treehouses built in the Airbnb’s planters, or a pattern (made with arugula leaves, flower buds, and green peas) Marcel arranges into the dirt in a window box outside. And then there is Marcel himself, this little anthropomorphic mollusk (I guess?) with his own special kind of wisdom, reminding us the ways in which even things around us are all creatures, great and small.

I find myself, after this particularly trying week in America, grateful to be seeing Marcel again.

One of the film’s many, many motifs is a reminder to pause and notice the beauty of the world around us—to live slowly and receptively, to stop and realize that we are all, in our ways, so small, and to remember the ways our lives can still make big impacts. But more than this, the film is clear that we are all (in a way) objects, all instruments. We are vehicles for beauty and love, if we only open ourselves up and let them flow through us.

This might seem trite, but if it does, that is my fault. I find myself, after this particularly trying week in America, grateful to be seeing Marcel again, shining in all his sincere glory from inside the most profound iteration of his chronicle yet. I am desperate to impart the splendidness and the earnestness of this achievement, committed to illuminating others to the wonders of this movie, candid about his ever-present perch in my heart but adamant that this film will appeal even to those who have never seen him before.

The film is genuine, never-cloying, always poignant. Nearly every shot is suffused with soft, golden sunshine and an ever so hazy, dreamlike grain. It is a warm, delicate, perfect project—a beautiful revisitation of and tribute to a character so surprisingly special and plucky that his relevance has outlasted a decade of changing popular cultural norms. Through everything, no matter what else there is, we are reminded that there is Marcel, there is Marcel, and there will always be Marcel.

* * * * * * *

Dean Fleischer Camp, director for “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,”
holds Marcel in his hands. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times

How ‘Marcel the Shell’ went from viral sensation

to 2022’s most adorable movie star

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(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

by Carlos Aguilar

June 24, 2022

Minuscule in mass but colossal in charm, Marcel, a one-eyed mollusk with a pair of pink sneakers attached to his exoskeleton, became an online sensation in late 2010. That’s when filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp and comedian and actor Jenny Slate, then a couple, unleashed his irresistible persona in a stop-motion short film on YouTube.

Over a decade later, following two more viral videos, their adorable brainchild now stars in the full-length mockumentary “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” which A24 is releasing exclusively in theaters this weekend. But the journey from the no-budget original shorts to the feature adventure, which premiered at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival, involved plenty of tiny but assertive steps.

The origins

Marcel’s childlike voice, where his heart-melting power resides, is Slate’s creation. She first summoned the soft-spoken tone during a trip for a friend’s wedding 12 years ago. To save money, she and Camp were sharing a hotel room with several people.

“I was feeling really cramped and I just started talking in this little voice, and we all thought it was funny,” Slate told The Times ahead of the film’s release. That playful impulse would soon take the shape of the now-beloved character known for sharing unexpectedly profound existential observations from a refreshingly clear-sighted perspective.

Jenny Slate conceived the voice of

Marcel over a decade ago.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

When the weekend was over, a panicked Camp remembered a promise to make a video for a friend’s stand-up comedy show. He immediately thought of interviewing Slate in that new voice and began building an idea around it. After recording the lines, he proceeded to handcraft a figure to personify them.

“Dean did such beautiful character design. When I saw Marcel standing on the kitchen table, I just felt so sure that that was him, like how people feel when they are in love at first sight,” noted Slate. “That’s how I felt about Marcel.”

Without previous knowledge of the stop-motion animation process, the director created the character, animated it, edited the scenes and screened Marcel’s first-ever appearance — all within 48 hours. At the time a self-proclaimed perfectionist, Camp had no intention to upload the short piece online until someone at the show inquired about the possibility of showing the wondrous sea creature to their grandmother.

“Now I derive a lot of meaning from the fact that he’s a shell, but back then, I was just trying to make a small, cute character out of found objects,” he said. “There’s an emotionality to that voice that I think I was trying to embody by using objects that you might find under your couch or in the back of a drawer. That was the impetus for it creatively.”

Slate can trace that interest in the inner lives of inanimate objects to a series of comedic videos, made long before Marcel came to be, where a variety of items narrate their lives or sing about their feelings. “One that I still love is of a container of powdered milk singing a tragic song about how nobody wants to use it because it’s not real milk. And that it’s very lonely,” she said with a laugh.

Since Marcel lives in the human world, Slate said that one of the major joys of creating his microcosms lies in repurposing household items from their intended use for his everyday activities. “I love figuring out how Marcel does things or what he wears for what. Suddenly all the objects around me are imbued with such possibility,” she said.

In “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” Marcel watches

as he becomes an internet sensation. (Courtesy of A24)

How ‘Marcel’ became a movie

As Marcel’s short films went viral online, Hollywood studios and networks approached Camp and Slate. The duo took the meetings, but were wary of attempts to attach Marcel to a more familiar tentpole template.

“I remember somebody suggested that we partner Marcel with Ryan Reynolds so they could fight crime. I’m not saying I wouldn’t watch that movie, but I just knew that was not the right avenue to pursue for him,” he recalled. “I wanted to make a movie that was personal and did justice to the internet love for this character. We knew after that round of meetings, ‘If we’re going to expand Marcel, it needs to be made independently.’”

Even before a movie was on the horizon, the co-creators published two books illustrated by artist Amy Lind: “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On: Things About Me” in 2011 and “Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been” in 2014. For Slate, the second tome represented a breakthrough in the development of the character’s emotional complexity.

“That one not only goes deeper into exploring Marcel’s perspective as a very small creature, but also begins to show his philosophy on life and what his preferences are,” said Slate. “We really get to know him and there are sweet little musings in there.”

Through it all, Camp and Slate continued collecting ideas and jokes for a possible feature film, without any specific story angle.

With time, the two realized that what they found compelling about Marcel directly related to their own preoccupations, such as the internet fame that their creation had amassed. That’s when Marcel’s journey to the big screen began to crystallize.

Dean Fleischer Camp, director & writer

of “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.”

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Joining creative forces with co-writer Nick Paley, the team wrote a long treatment and started hosting recording sessions where Slate would give form to Marcel’s dialogue with spur of the moment ingenuity. Based on what those improvisation meetings yielded, Camp and Paley slowly polished and rerouted the plot.

“They would put together a patchwork of transcription of recorded audio and then write new scenes. Then we would record off of those written new scenes and improvise off of them too,” said Slate. “Most of the film is highly improvised, while some parts were word-for-word written out, depending on what Dean and Nick decided to do.”

“We were writing and recording for two and a half years, but probably 10 to 12 days of that we were recording audio periodically,” added Camp. “We’d record with Jenny again, she’d give us all this new, great material, and then we would incorporate it into the script.”

During this process, renowned actress and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini came aboard to voice Marcel’s wise and cheeky grandmother, Nana Connie. Fleischer-Camp had been fascinated with the series of peculiar short films Rossellini created for the Sundance Channel in the late 2000s titled “Green Porno,” focused on animal behavior and mating rituals.

“She’s more like Nana Connie than I think any other role she’s played. She has an inner strength and a real mettle to her,” he said. “She also knows a ton about farming. She lives on a farm that she works with several other people.” (Some of the audio of Nana Connie talking about her strawberries in the finished film comes from the director’s interview with Rossellini about her real-life crops.)

Dean and Marcel the Shell | (Courtesy of A24)

Dean plays himself

As with the short films, which were framed as nonfiction shorts about Marcel made by a filmmaker named Dean, Camp knew his voice would also feature in the larger project. But he wasn’t keen on appearing in front of the camera as a somewhat fictionalized version of himself.

“It wasn’t part of the original pitch. Although going in, we did have the idea that Dean would evolve in this way and that Marcel would sort of push him out of his comfort zone,” he said. “Dean would have to confront artistic, but also personal questions on role of the director. ‘How much do you help a documentary subject when they’re in need?’ ‘What does that relationship consist of?’ Those got explored as a result of making the film.”

As Slate notes, Marcel also ponders the cause and effect of what it means to be filmed. The short films that made him famous in our reality also exist in the feature as documentaries, and Marcel is aware of them and affected by their success and fandom.

“He had thought he was just in conversation. But then, the short films that the filmmaker Dean puts online end up affecting him. They affect his point of view,” said Slate. “They affect what he thinks is possible. They cause him to hope when hope is often painful. We see all of that because Marcel continues to engage.”

Eventually the director gave in to playing Dean on camera — and the character has a fuller arc examining the ethics of his relationship with the endearing shell. Camp even factors into an interview with Lesley Stahl and the “60 Minutes” crew — Marcel and Nana Connie are devoted fans of the investigative show.

The movie’s Dean is also processing a recent romantic breakup. That this separation was written as part of the tale even before Camp and Slate divorced in 2016, seemed curiously prophetic to the filmmaker.

“I love how much I find in the film and in the story and in the character that feels somewhat unintentional or at least feels subconscious,” he said. “I’m an idiot because I always think that whatever I’m making is just total fiction. Then years later I’m always surprised at how personal my movies end up, and this one is no exception.”

Marcel and his Nana Connie in "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On." (Courtesy of A24)

What comes next

With Marcel now warming souls in movie theaters, Slate feels confident that this ever-deepening character has a promising, if still undecided, future.

“As long as I’m a living person there will be more to explore about Marcel because there’s a big part of him that really lives in my psyche,” she said. “He’s exactly the same as when we first met him. He’s just revealed himself more. The best thing about Marcel is that he very rarely says he doesn’t want to answer a question. That’s why we keep getting to know him.”

Slate and Camp agree that the years alongside their lovably witty artistic offspring has elucidated significant truths about themselves, all while teaching them invaluable lessons in tackling adversity.

“I find Marcel truly inspiring, especially the way that he never feels small, even if he is. He never feels overlooked. He never feels like the world is unfair. Most people can relate to feeling like they are in a world that wasn’t made for them,” said Camp. “But he doesn’t see his differences. When he runs into an obstacle, he doesn’t see impossibility. He’ll find a way around it just like yesterday and just like tomorrow.”

 Dean Fleischer-Camp & Jenny Slater

Rosa Salazar, Dean Fleisher-Camp, Jenny Slater

Cast of Marcel the Shell

Guess why I smile? Uh, because it's worth it.

- Marcel the Shell

Jenny Slate

Marcel

Guess what I do for adventure... I hang glide on a Dorito.

- Marcel the Shell

Dean Fleischer-Camp

Dean

But sometimes I tie a hair to a piece of lint and I drag it around.

His name is Alan. He doesn't know tricks or anything.

- Marcel the Shell

Isabella Rossellini

Connie

Life's a party. Rock your body."

-Marcel the Shell

Nathan Fielder

Justin

You can't make yourself a nickname,

like you can make yourself a new hairstyle.

- Marcel the Shell

Rosa Salazar

Larissa

One time I nibbled on a piece of cheese

and my cholesterol went up to 900.

- Marcel the Shell

Thomas Mann

Mark

Do you want to watch me try to lift this?

Alright... ehheh, ehh, ughh...

Nah, I can't. I can't' life anything up at all.

- Marcel the Shell

Lesley Stahl

herself

My one regret in life is that I'll never have a dog.

-Marcel the Shell

Jessi Klein

Judy

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On

Official Trailer (2022) Jenny Slate, Rosa Salazar

Addition Video Interviews & Shorts