Philip Larkin: Collected Poems

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The gold-titted mirage of the armada, and the single ship hunting us. Like Google, Larkin at his best makes genius look easy. 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.

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Seamus Heaneyin the Observer.The collection contains Larkin’s six previous volumes of poetry as well as 83 of his unpublished poems gleaned from notebooks and homemade booklets.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 Shapiropointed 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. If you want to see a little of Larkin's typical, sad style, try "Talking in Bed," "High Windows," and "Posterity," some of my favorites that will make you feel terrible as soon as you understand them. 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):He had begun the poem in 1974, the year that his final collection High Windows appeared, but he laid it aside and returned to it three years later, in the summer of 1977. Our Family Station in St Pancras is open from 10.00-12.00 every Friday and we're continuing to welcome schools, as well as families and adult learners to our courses and access events. All our in-person and livestreamed events are going ahead. Other services 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: This one that i want to quote here is I suppose his biggest hit but quite right too – it’s really a fantastic piece. Every phrase is a marvel, exactly sketching out all the banalities of an English train journey in the 1950s and now, but then also unearthing a forgotten, almost unnoticed social ritual which is completely a 50s thing, quaint and moving. Nowadays every other couple get married in Barbados or Bali, and the other ones wouldn’t be caught dead using public transport to start their honeymoon with. Next, Please: about death, which is memorably depicted as a ship in whose wake "no waters breed or break"

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer. 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. High Windows: probably one of the most memorable of Larkin's poems. The poem as a whole is not my cup of tea -- I guess I just can't relate -- but there's something so aesthetically breathtaking about the last stanza, even out of context. 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;”. Most of the time I’m not much for poetry, it’s just so precious and thinks a lot of itself, it swanks around preening and sneering.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.) All of our upcoming public events and our St Pancras building tours are going ahead. Read our latest blog post about planned events for more information. I get my poetry from the grooves of old 45s, from the howls of old blues, from surfers and hotrodders, punks and acidheads and proggers and cowboys and from the antique antic folk with their 75 verse ballads about some duke who shagged some other duke’s betrothed and got the heat rained down on his ass and his kith’s ass in 1355. 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. 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’.

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. 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’. 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.In summary, ‘Aubade’ is about the poet waking at four in the morning to ‘soundless dark’ and being gripped by the terror of his own death which, with the dawning of a new day, is ‘a whole day nearer now’. He cannot say how, where, or when he will die, but that doesn’t stop him from contemplating his own demise – a horrifying thought. That we are looking at billboards here was not immediately obvious to me but, once I happily saw the images coming together, I could not help but see them. 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. In a ponderous poem about the ponderousness of pillow talk, he rhymes "kind" and "unkind" - that's how much post-coital conversation pained him. A kitschy street advertisement for a beach town becomes a symbol of absolute decay in Sunny Prestatyn. And when he closes his most famous book with the line "What will survive of us is love," there is no ambiguity such as divided McEwan and Hitchens over "somewhere becoming rain." It is the definition of irony here. The list of poems by Philip Larkin come mostly from the four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime: [1] [2]

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 Worldreviewer 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.” For the 1988 edition, editor Anthony Thwaite included all of Philip Larkin's published poetry as well as unpublished and incomplete work. Thwaite divided the book into two sections: what he considered the mature (post war) poetry, 1946 - 1983, and juvenilia, 1938 - 1945. Larkin's three most popular and celebrated collections (The Less Deceived, The Witsun Weddings, and The High Window) fall in the first part of the book, but account for just 85 poems, with 87 poems uncollected (or appearing only in the privately printed XX Poems) of which 61 were previously unpublished, a handful of which were clearly unfinished. This section also included Larkin's own unpublished second collection In the Grip of Light). Larkin then says, in defence of parents everywhere, that this wasn’t their fault: they, too, were damaged by their upbringing by their parents, who spent their lives being either emotionally buttoned-up or, when they did show any emotion, arguing and creating a fraught home life for their children. He concludes by saying that this is the way of humankind: we pass on our own miseries to our children, and they pass on theirs to their children’s children, and so on. 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. 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.

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: The 2003 edition includes Larkin's uncollected poems in two appendices. The first appendix contains poems published in magazines and journals before 1972, but not subsequently collected by Larkin. The contents of the privately printed XX Poems (1951) are deemed to be in this category. A"Complete Poems" is a death certificate and memorial combined. After the Selected and the Collected, the Complete marks the poet's official demise and at the same time erects a carven monument designed to outlast the ages. In the case of this mighty volume of the all of Larkin, there is something too of the coroner's report. The Larkinesquely named Archie Burnett conducts a forensic examination of the poet's imaginative venture, and in the process leaves no headstone unturned. The result is awe-inspiring, exhaustive and faintly risible. Larkin himself would have made merciless fun of it, but the poet, and the librarian, in him would have been immensely pleased and proud.