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.) 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. 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. But it was the death of Larkin’s mother, in November of that year, that seems to have inspired him to finish the poem. Yet the poem is about Larkin’s death first and foremost, and offers a stark and harrowing vision of human mortality. 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 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;”. 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.” 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. 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.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’. 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 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’. 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.” Next, Please: about death, which is memorably depicted as a ship in whose wake "no waters breed or break"

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’. public Wi-Fi - this extends to the majority of our public spaces including the Reading Rooms, as well as our study desks and galleries at St Pancras (you won't require a login) 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. Deceptions: a painful one, about rape. However, the last line, "To burst into fulfilment's desolate attic", feels tragic in a more universal way, and warns of the hidden bleakness of any sort of presumed fulfillment -- in love, career, life -- which honestly just about sums up Larkin's less cheerful poems. (Incidentally, this line was also mentioned by the author in the introduction to Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis, in which the author recalls a bout of depression that coincided the publication of a bestselling novel; the context may differ from that of the poem, but the use of that specific line feels apt.)The ending lines of The Whitsun Weddings were also the subject, famously, of one of Ian McEwan and Christopher Hitchens' last conversations: 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): 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. 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.

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.

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: 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. 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: I first encountered Larkin in the context of a high school English class. The prospect of impending exams and having to churn out 1,500 words on The Theme of Death in Larkin's Poetry can sour one's appreciation of even the most skilled writer, so it wasn't until recently that I felt able to re-read his work with the respect it deserves. If your own experience with Larkin was similarly marred by scholastic resentment, I would suggest you to take another look at his poems once your grades are no longer on the line. 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.