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. Sometimes this combination of, to steal from Toibin, consoling form and unconsoled message can be delicious, as in the 1951 poem which is sardonically titled Next, Please and depicts the promise of the future as a distant armada: For the 1988 edition, editor Anthony Thwaite included all of Philip Larkin's published poetry as well as unpublished and incomplete work.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85 poems, with 87 poems uncollected (or appearing only in the privately printed XX Poems) of which 61 were previously unpublished, a handful of which were clearly unfinished. This section also included Larkin's own unpublished second collection In the Grip of Light). 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.” 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.

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: 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. 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. 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.That "local girls' school" is a quintessential Larkin detail, an interjection from his " Brunette Coleman" persona.

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.” I like Philip Larkin's work, as he isn't too difficult to understand and you can read his poems without having to put the book down and mull over a sentence for ten minutes, wondering what it might mean. I read this a few years ago, starting at the beginning, before sailing through to the end, over the course of a few days, like reading a novel. Its one of those collections where you can do this, as its written in pretty plain English and isn't abstract or fancy, not that there's anything wrong with that sometimes of course. He worked for many years as a librarian, wandering amongst the bookshelves, probably lost in his own thoughts about the perplexities of life I'd imagine and was a pretty low key figure and certainly not some super-star poet (if those exist). I think he experienced a private, quiet sort of life and had a fairly mundane existence in a way and that comes across in these poems, which are matter of fact and down to earth. He wasn't one to rave about the world in ecstatic wonder, or effusively gush about the beauty and grandeur of life and was rather a realist who wrote about sometimes drab subjects and dull people, but in an engaging and somehow fascinating sort of way... 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.

What is currently available?

But as we say, that’s because he left behind a whole raft of great poems, not just a few. And our final recommendation is to get hold of the Collected Poems from your bookshop or local library and start reading all of it. Go on. It won’t take that long. He didn’t leave that many poems, but what he did leave were plenty of classics. If you don’t own it already, treat yourself to a copy of Philip Larkin: Collected Poems . Well worth it, for the price of lunch. 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. But just occasionally, an actual poet comes and does something completely magical with words. So I’m reading through Philip Larkin’s stuff and finding I really like his sour, defeated, depressed but soldiering-on-anyway voice.

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: 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’.Written in 1971, this is another of Larkin’s most famous poems. Its opening line is probably the best-known in all of poetry – but don’t recite it too loudly in your local library. 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): 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.

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. Larkin stopped writing poetry shortly after his collection High Windowswas published in 1974. In an Observerobituary, 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 Magazinecorrespondent 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 oeuvrewas 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. Shawin 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.” 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. 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. 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.

Cyber incident

Next, Please: about death, which is memorably depicted as a ship in whose wake "no waters breed or break" In the matter of publishing, Larkin was the most frugal of poets. One readily understands why he should wish to suppress or at least not display the bulk of his early work, in which, like so many (male) poets in their youth he spends so much of the time mirror-gazing. The pre-1945 poems throb with forced passion, as he struggles to give a metaphysical cast to his youthful lusts and longings for romance. But even after 1945, when he had discovered Hardy's poetry and forged his own voice, he left scores of wonderful poems undisclosed to public view. 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.) 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.