Philip Larkin: Collected Poems

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The speaker (probably Larkin himself, or a close approximation) watches all the newlywed couples who join the train as it stops at various stations, and muses upon the futures of the married couples whose lives at this moment are so filled with happiness and excitement. (See ‘Afternoons’ above for a contrast, where the wedding albums of nondescript families are found ‘lying near the television’–‘lying’, as so often in Larkin’s poetry, is a piece of wordplay loaded with truth.) The book follows Larkin, his poetry and English society from the 1940s through to the 1980s. The social changes during the 60s and 70s were immense and Larkin reflects them with interest, regret at what he has missed and at what is lost, as well as with a certain gentle understanding and empathy. In his first publication, The North Ship, (July 1945) at poem XX, he watches “a girl dragged by the wrists/Across a dazzling field of snow,”. “…she laughs and struggles, and pretends to fight;” He is filled with envy and regret that he cannot be like her, laughing and playing in the snow. Instead,”For me the task’s to learn the many times/ When I must stoop, and throw a shovelful;”. Perhaps Larkin’s last great poem. Larkin completed ‘Aubade’ in November 1977, and the poem was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 23 December – ruining quite a few Christmas dinners, as Larkin himself predicted. Those strengths of craftsmanship and technical skill in Larkin’s mature works received almost universal approval from literary critics. London Sunday Timescorrespondent 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 Leadercontributor 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.” Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter. As both are moveable feasts that information is not so useful, but it happens in late May. In these secular times hardly anyone in England would have the faintest idea what a Whitsun was. It was changed into “Spring Bank Holiday” in 1978.

Does the arrow-shower that becomes rain at the end of the poem represent Cupid’s dart turning into the miserableness of married life? Or should the rain here be seen as a positive, life-giving force? Given that it’s Larkin we’re talking about here, we’re inclined to believe it’s the former, but Larkin deftly leaves the image ambiguous. We’ve discussed this, and other curious aspects of the poem, in our analysis of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. 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. Musing upon the effigies of a medieval earl and countess buried side by side, this poem is a tender meditation on love from one of poetry’s most famous bachelors (Larkin was a bachelor in so far as he never married; he did, however, have relationships with several women – simultaneously, in fact). Like many of Larkin’s poems it takes the form of an internal debate in which the poet discusses two sides of a particular situation, prompted by the witnessing of some event or moment (here, the visit to the Arundel tomb of the title). Love Songs in Age: this one starts off on a light and even sweet note that leaves the reader wholly unprepared for the chilling brutality of the last few lines. This might actually be my absolute favourite. The identities of the figures in the real Arundel tomb are the fourteenth-century Richard FitzAlan and Eleanor of Lancaster, who are actually buried in Lewes Priory. So although Larkin calls the effigies a ‘tomb’, they are technically a ‘memorial’ because the bodies are buried elsewhere. But let’s face it, ‘An Arundel Tomb’ sounds better than ‘An Arundel Memorial’.Simple, uncomplicated poetry. It is no wonder that Larkin is one of the best loved poets. He never tries to hide anything behind his words, his words and his poetry are all-in, so to speak. I need to read the properly arranged version, but this was a good start. First, a big thank you to Tilly for including Larkin’s 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album’ in her review of this book. After decades of having a baseless bias against Larkin, probably just his name and time, I sat down and read his collected poems: a wonderful read.

Larkin was not a simple poet. He studied the world around him, the inner worlds of his contemporaries and his own inner contradictions. He also liked to put forward images which did not always let the reader know where he was going until they had committed to a close reading. It is often like watching over an artist’s shoulder as she begins to sketch in a scene then moves on one colour at a time until, only slowly, does the image take form, as in essential beauty: Philip Larkin seemed to be everywhere in 2011 and 2012. Annus Mirabilis figured prominently in Julian Barnes's novel The Sense of an Ending (so much so that critical analysis of Larkin took over a good portion of Colm Toibin's review of that Booker Prize-winning novella in The New York Review of Books): 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.The title poem of Larkin’s third major volume of poems, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is a long poem in Larkin terms. It describes a train journey from Hull down to London on Whitsun weekend. The gold-titted mirage of the armada, and the single ship hunting us. Like Google, Larkin at his best makes genius look easy.

You can also still join BIPC events and webinars and access one-to-one support. See what's available at the British Library in St Pancras or online and in person via BIPCs in libraries across London. One of the gems in The Less Deceived, ‘Toads’ is one of Larkin’s meditations (or perhaps invectives) on the subject of work. When asked years later by an interviewer (Larkin only gave interviews very reluctantly, though he did appear on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs) how he came up with the comparison between work and the toad, Larkin gave the Wildean reply, ‘Sheer genius’. Collected Poems is the title of a posthumous collection of Philip Larkin's poetry edited by Anthony Thwaite and published by Faber and Faber. He released two notably different editions in 1988 and 2003, the first of which also includes previously unpublished work. Both editions include the contents of Larkin's collections The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, plus other material. Larkin's poetry is too non-specific for my liking. He is said to have modeled his writing after Yeats. Neither of these poets are ones for whom I feel much or who invoke much imagery when I have read their works. They are more wordsmiths to be sure.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. The list of poems by Philip Larkin come mostly from the four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime: [1] [2] The Literary World - a poem about Tennyson's wife. As the wife of a poet we get a glimpse of the burden she shouldered. Often, Larkin's poems proceed in relatively normal narrative English only to reach their justification in well-condensed phrases that seem to resonate with existential despair: