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.

A striking development in Larkin’s second book of poems, The Less Deceived, is his insistence on the mundane, the unexceptional, the commonplace. In “Born Yesterday,” a poem on the occasion of Sally Amis’s birth, for example, he counters the usual wishes for beauty or brilliance with the attractive (for him) possibility of being utterly unextraordinary, of fitting in wholly by having nothing stand out. This wish he offers, he says, in case the others do not come true, but one almost has the sense that he wishes also that the others will not come true, that being average is much preferable to being exceptional.

Larkin's commentary and observations about aging and disappointment and the fears and uncertainties that keep us trapped in conformity despite our wishes for freedom, or desire to get the girl, or hopes (in vain) to evade the disappointment that successive looks in the mirror yield over time--frequently have a (gut) punch line. It's as he said himself, in the aptly named poem entitled 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.

If Rudyard Kipling’s ( 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) is the poetry of empire, then Philip Larkin’s is the poetry of the aftermath of empire. Having lived through the divestiture of England’s various colonial holdings, the economic impact of empire building having finally come home, together with the ultimate travesty of imperial pretensions and the nightmare of Nazi and Soviet colonization in Europe, Larkin was wary of the expansiveness, the acquisitiveness, and the grandeur implicit in the imperial mentality. Many features of his poetry can be traced to that wariness: from the skepticism and irony, to the colloquial diction, to the formal precision of his poems. 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. Edited texts: New Poems, 1958 (with Louis MacNeice and Bonamy Dobrée); The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, 1973. Larkin, ever parsimonious, wrote very few poems during the last decade of his life: Collected Poems reveals a mere seventeen. Many of those concern themselves with his standard topics—the ravages of age, the sense of not being in step with the rest of society, the approach of death. In “The Mower,” for example, he ruminates on having run over a hedgehog in the tall grass, killing it. From this experience, he takes away a feeling of responsibility for the death, a sense of the loss of this fellow creature, and the reflection that, given our limited time, we should be kind to one another. This slight poem (eleven lines) sums up much of Larkin’s thought in his later years: Death is a complete cessation of experience, not a transmutation but a blankness, an end, while life itself is a vale of unhappiness, and people therefore owe it to themselves and one another to make the way as pleasant as possible. Larkin can at times be mordantly humorous. In “If My Darling” he speculates about what his girl might think if she could view the vile contents of his mind (“monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles/ Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate”), in “Toad” he compares his day-job to an intrusive amphibian (“why should I let the toad work squat on my life?), and in “I Remember, I Remember,” he excuses Coventry, the town he lived in for the painfully uneventful first eighteen years of his life, from any specific responsibility (“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”)I suspect much of my neglect may be due to my knee-jerk preferences in mid-century verse: I favor the American over the British, the surrealist over the rhetorical, the bi-polar over the cynical. But I suspect there are other reasons that run deeper. For years, you see, I strove to be playful, guileless, and ardent. This was hard work at times, and required a steady diet of denial. The resulting sense of human insignificance, including his own, leads him to several of the characteristic features of his work. He rejects “poetic” devices in favor of simpler, more mundane vehicles. His diction, for example, is nearly always colloquial, often coarse, vulgar, or profane. His distrust of a specialized diction or syntax for poetry reflects his distrust of institutions generally. Similarly, he shies away from the intense poetic moment—image, symbol, metaphor—in favor of a discursive, argumentative verse. Although he will occasionally resolve a poem through use of an image or a metaphor, particularly in High Windows, he more commonly talks his way through the poem, relying on intellect rather than emotion or intuition. There is also in these early poems a vagueness in the description of the phenomenal world. Perhaps that generality, that vagueness, could be explained as the result of the Yeatsian influence, but it is also a tendency of Larkin’s later work. One often has the impression that a scene, particularly a human scene, is typical rather than specific.

The first two stanzas are curtly dismissive in a manner often encountered in Larkin, as he describes his stop from a bicycle trip at a church that is apparently Ulster Protestant. Neither he (since he stops for a reason he cannot name and acts guilty as he looks around) nor the church (since it is not at all out of the ordinary) seems worthy of attention. He leaves, thinking the church “not worth stopping for.” In the third stanza, however, the poem shifts gears in a way typical of Larkin’s finest work: the dismissive attitude toward mundane existence, the wry observations give way to serious contemplation. “Church Going,” in fact, contains two such shifts.

Book contents

Has Michael orchestrated Roisin’s death to gain his freedom? Was he jealous of her literary fame? Is that too obvious? (Has he not heard of divorce? Is that why we are in Ireland?) Who has taken against Ophelia and why? Apart from the fact that she is called Ophelia, which is not her fault. Leader, Zachary, ed. The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. The descriptive passages are universally successful at evoking what they are intended to evoke: over and over, Larkin deftly conjures up a film-reel of vivid images, laid out in a patchwork of faintly bestial Anglo-Saxon monosyllables ("yowl," "spoor," "splay," "fleece," "wade"). When it comes to trying to understand the philosophic passages, on the other hand, I confess I am often lost. On the occasions where I do find Larkin's philosophizing to be both (1) intelligible and (2) non-obvious, the epiphanies that he flashes before my eyes are well worth holding onto: e.g., the idea that good art is a "rough-tongued bell...whose individual sound/Insists I too am individual," or the idea that a church is a place where "all our compulsions meet,/Are recognized, and robed as destinies."

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.”

Summary

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. McClatchyin the New York Times Book Review. Phoenixcontributor 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. Agendareviewer 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.” 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. His ponderances on the fate of churches when the religion they were built to serve is gone remind of Nietzsche’s madman, who claimed that cathedrals were now only graves and sepulchres for the dead God. Here Larkin’s cynicism about the way in which our culture is headed is evident, yet paradoxically he is a product of that culture. Again, that constant strain of alienation insinuates its way into poem after poem. Throughout The Whitsun Weddings, the poet feels himself cut off from his fellow humans, often struggling to retrieve a spirit of community with them, sometimes simply wondering why it is so. The volume, while it represents little change from its predecessor, renders a picture of a man in middle age who feels life passing him by, and who sees more and more clearly the inevitable. Settings are close, small; lives are petty, insignificant; society is filled with graffiti and pollution. In “The Importance of Elsewhere,” he finds comfort in being a foreigner in Ireland, since at least he can explain his estrangement from his fellow inhabitants there. In England, ostensibly at home, he has no such excuse. High Windows Take a look at Larkin's likeness, rendered in both paintings and photograph, in the National Portrait Gallery's six portraits of the poet himself.