Collected Poems

by Philip Larkin

ISBN#: 0374529205

Ed: Anthony Thwaite

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, British Literature, Literature, 20th Century, English Literature

Paperback, 218pp

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

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.

Larkin was born in city of Coventry, England, the only son and younger child of Sydney Larkin (1884–1948), city treasurer of Coventry, who came from Lichfield, and his wife, Eva Emily Day (1886–1977), of Epping. From 1930 to 1940 he was educated at King Henry VIII School in Coventry, and in October 1940, in the midst of the Second World War, went up to St John's College, Oxford, to read English language and literature. Having been rejected for military service because of his poor eyesight, Larkin was able, unlike many of his contemporaries, to follow the traditional full-length degree course, taking a first-class degree in 1943. Whilst at Oxford he met Kingsley Amis, who would become a lifelong friend and frequent correspondent. Shortly after graduating he was appointed municipal librarian at Wellington, Shropshire. In 1946, he became assistant librarian at University College, Leicester and in 1955 sub-librarian at Queen's University, Belfast. In March 1955, Larkin was appointed librarian at The University of Hull, a position he retained until his death.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

Most of the time this is my kind of poetry:

There's a tugboat down by the river
Where a cement bag’s just a-droopin' on down
Oh, that cement is just for the weight, dear
Five'll get you ten old Mack is back in town. (Louis Armstrong)

or


A candy-colored clown they call the sandman
Tiptoes to my room every night
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper
“Go to sleep everything is all right” (Roy Orbison)


or

Well I’m not the world’s most physical guy
But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine
Oh my Lola, lo-lo-lo-lo-la Lola (The Kinks)

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.

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.

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.

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 Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin (1958)


That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about one-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

At first, I didn't notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
- An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And
someone running up to bowl - and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

[Petra wonders if AI going to kill search engines? · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read Emir Never's comment. Clever man!

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Edit

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

Favorite:

“Best Society” by Philip Larkin

When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired — though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it’s just
A compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on — in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.

Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

(1951)

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.

This Be the Stoic’s Reply to Philip Larkin

My mum and dad didn’t fuck me up
Or if they tried who's gonna notice
Faults I may have and that’s tough luck
I’ve only me to blame for this

Most anyone can be a victim
(Does anybody really care?)
And say the world should end with him
Whose mother’s father had no hair

Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf
Yes but while alive do what you can
To keep the moaning to yourself

[Jay Pluck · Rating 5 out of 5]

When people say they don't like Larkin I wonder what the f*ck they read that they didn't like.

[Jeroen Vandenbossche · Rating 3 out of 5]

To readers of my generation, Larkin will likely forever be known as the author of that one poem entitled “This be the verse.”

Doesn’t ring a bell?

It probably will if I tell you the opening verse reads: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”

While I love both my parents (and my kids), I too recognise that it is a very powerful poem indeed (if you are tempted to google it, you will undoubtedly note the superb metaphor in the penultimate sentence.)

That said, it is too bad that Larkin’s entire reputation as a misanthropic, bitter poet is based on that single, short poem.

As I discovered in the past weeks and months, his collected poems contain quite a few other gems with a very different tonality. I’ll leave you with one melancholy example for now and may come back with more later:

“Maiden Name

Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it,scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since you're past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laden.”

Edit June 2024:

As promised, here is one more absolutely brilliant example, a seemingly simple poem about the two main sources of happiness: solitude and company:

“Reasons For Attendance

The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative,
Draws me a moment to the lighted glass
To watch the dancers - all under twenty-five -
Solemnly on the beat of happiness.

- Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat,
The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out there ?
But then, why be in there? Sex, yes, but what
Is sex ? Surely to think the lion's share
Of happiness is found by couples - sheer

Inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned.
What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell
(Art, if you like) whose individual sound
Insists I too am individual.
It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well,

But not for me, nor I for them; and so
With happiness. Therefor I stay outside,
Believing this, and they maul to and fro,
Believing that; and both are satisfied,
If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied.”

Edit August 2024:

I am adding a third now that struck me a moment ago while perusing this collection again:

“The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time”.

[Jonfaith]

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

I read most of these poems sitting by my father as he recovered today form an early morning procedure. Everything should be fine except that at his age there's always an enhanced risk. I thought about age and relativity, how Larkin was old in his own life--his own time in a sense perhaps i can't exactly understand, although I am nearly 54. There is a beige resignation in Larkin's verse. There is also a celebration of failure and The Fallen. He anticipates DeLillo in brocading misinformation and uncertainty. It is our fate to largely not understand.

There is a strange core of eroticism in Larkin. It is an El Dorado of sorts as well as a potter’s field. Perhaps I can embrace his celebration of selfishness-- if it does indeed constitute jazz, alcohol and a large fire. I also sense early Modern values, a Burton or an Erasmus living in postwar suburbs. Perhaps the poet goes to the DIY shop for an alchemy of contrived bliss?

My father did eventually ask if I was reading poetry for my wife? I gave him a look.

[withdrawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

The initial challenge was to decide how best to read these poems. I finally decided on reading out loud, not easily done in a busy household, in order best to catch the rhythms and rhymes. It was also necessary to read these poems with tongue placed firmly in cheek: the better to catch the often present irony. To miss Larkin’s irony is to misunderstand much of his meaning. However, not all is ironic. There is also a great deal of loneliness, dissatisfaction with the contemporary social order and appreciation of many aspects of his English heritage. It all comes down to discovering the mood.

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:

In frames as large as rooms that face all ways
And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,
Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine
Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves
Of how life should be. High above the gutter
A silver knife sinks into golden butter,
A glass of milk stands in a meadow, and
Well-balanced families, in fine
Mid-summer weather, owe their smiles, their cars,
Even their youth, to that small cube each hand
Stretches towards. These, and the deep armchairs
Aligned to cups at bedtime, radiant bars
(Gas or electric), quarter-profile cats
By slippers on warm mats,
Reflect none of the rained-on streets an squares

They dominate outdoors. ….

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.

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;”.

From High Windows, (1974), we get:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives-

The bitter envy of 1945 has been replaced with a feeling of sorrow that the poet has missed out on something. The regret is sadder, gentler, more empathetic than 20 years earlier. One also gets the sense that Larkin felt a certain thrill at putting into print the words, “he’s fucking her”, for the first time. Society has changed and Larkin has tried to express himself more freely, enjoying a certain liberation with the times. This movement with the changes in society is seen throughout Larkin’s poems.

I shall end this review now with 'Annus Mirabilis', a poem I think reveals great deal about Larkin and his world, even if he did overestimate the effects of the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ (although I do recall thinking back then that we had invented sexual intercourse). [For best results, read out loud]

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Up until then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty- three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Philip Larkin was a poet who understood himself, in all of his loneliness, despair and his all-too human disgust with himself along with a scattering of self pity but who constantly saw the rest of humanity with an empathetic eye, even when he expressed this empathy with a cynical tongue.

[Megan Baxter · Rating 3 out of 5]

I fully admit that I know very little about poetry. Very little. But what I've now read of Philip Larkin's work really didn't grab me at all. At times, it irritated the heck out of me. (This started with a nasty little poem called "To My Wife" and never really went away. Also, as far as I could tell, he never married.)

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourites -

Places, Loved Ones
Maiden Name
No Road
Triple Time
Latest Face
I Remember, I Remember
If, My Darling
Love Songs in Age
Talking in Bed
Dublinesque

LATEST FACE

Latest face, so effortless
Your great arrival at my eyes,
No one standing near could guess
Your beauty had no home til then;
Precious vagrant, recognise
My look, and do not turn again.

Admirer and admired embrace
On a useless level, where
I contain your current grace,
You my judgment; yet to move
Into really untidy air
Brings no lasting attribute,
Bargains, suffering, and love,
Not this always-planned salute.

Lies grow dark around us: will
The statue of your beauty walk?
Must I wade behind it, till
Something's found - or is not found -
Far too late for turning back?
Or, if I will not shift my ground,
Is your power actual - can
Denial of you duck and run,
Stay out sight and double round,
Leap from the sun with mask and brand
And murder and not understand?

[Mark Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection presents Larkin's poems in his own deliberate order and in original sequence, featuring four of his books: The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows.

Ever appealing and intelligible, unapologetic and poignant; he effortlessly straddles the gaps between melancholy and joy in deft sardonic reverie. Larkin remains one of the greatest, yet arguably underrated curator of words in the English language.

Recommend: XXVI, XXIX, Wires, Wants, anything from High Windows.

[Ρένα Λούνα · Rating 5 out of 5]

'SINCE THE MAJORITY OF ME'

Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide. And sure of what to do

We disinfect new blocks of days
For our majorities to rent
With unshared friends and unwalked ways.
But silence too is eloquent:

A silence of minorities
That, unopposed at last, return
Each night with cancelled promises
They want renewed. They never learn.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

«não há muito para dizer acerca da minha obra. Uma vez lido um poema é isso mesmo, é completamente claro o que quer dizer.»
— Philip Larkin

"Aubade

Trabalho o dia inteiro e à noite bebo demais.
Acordo às quatro e fito a escuridão silenciosa.
A seu tempo a luz colorirá a orla das cortinas.
Até lá vejo o que sempre de verdade lá está:
A morte sem repouso, agora um dia inteiro mais perto,
Não me deixa pensar a nada ser em como
E onde e quase eu próprio hei-de morrer.
Árida interrogação: mas o pavor
De morrer e de estar morto,
Reluz de novo diante de mim e horroriza.

O clarão esvazia a mente. Não é remorso
— O bem que não se fez, o amor negado, o tempo
Arrancado sem uso — nem amargura por
Uma única vida tanto tempo poder levar a libertar-se
Das origens erradas sem talvez o conseguir;
É vislumbrar o total e infinito,
A extinção inevitável para onde caminhamos
E onde para sempre nos iremos perder. Não estar aqui,
Não estar em parte alguma,
E em breve; nada mais terrível, nada mais certo.

Esta é uma forma especial de ter medo
Que nenhum ardil vence. A religião tentou,
Esse vasto brocado musical roído pelas traças
Criado para fingir que não morremos nunca,
E ditos especiosos como Os seres racionais
Não podem recear o que não hão-de sentir, sem perceber
Que é esse mesmo o nosso temor — não ver, não ouvir,
Não tocar, sentir cheiro ou sabor, não ter com que pensar,
Nem modo de amar ou formar laços,
A anestesia de que ninguém pode despertar.

E assim permanece na orla da visão,
Uma pequena mancha desfocada, um contínuo arrepio
Que esmorece cada impulso ao ponto da indecisão.
Muitas coisas poderão não vir a ser; esta será,
E sabê-lo gera uma fornalha
De pavor em turbilhão quando somos apanhados
Sem companhia de gente ou álcool. Coragem de nada vale:
Serve apenas para não assustar os outros. Ser valente
Não isenta ninguém da cova.
A morte receada não difere daquela que se enfrenta.

Aos poucos a luz aumenta e o quarto ganha forma.
Tão concreto como o guarda-fato lá está o que sabemos,
Sempre soubemos e a que sabemos não poder fugir,
Mas, mesmo assim, não aceitamos. Um dos lados perderá.
Entretanto telefones, de cócoras, preparam-se para tocar
Nos escritórios fechados e todo o intrincado
E indiferente mundo de aluguer começa a despertar.
O céu está branco de argila, sem sol.
Há trabalhos para fazer.
Os carteiros, como médicos, vão de porta em porta."


(Morteza Katouzian, The Dead-End, 1981)

[Nathaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because the section of Larkin's "Early Poems" makes the final third of this collection a rather unrewarding slog, "Collected Poems" sat on my "currently reading" shelf for nearly a year. Then I decided that I didn't need to read every one of the poems that Larkin himself downplayed and shuffled from the spotlight in order to consider this book "read." I read it, from page 3 to page 221 and now and then, in disappointed little moments, I read bits of the final hundred pages.

Before I try describing Larkin's poetry and try understanding why I like him, let me devote a few sentences to people with less time. Read: "Solar;" "The Building;" "The Old Fools;" and "Aubade." These are longer poems, crafted around Larkin's favorite themes in some of his best language. They are sharp, entertaining, acidic and reduced. If you don't enjoy them, I don't think you should bother with Larkin's shorter, less thoughtful (and often mopier) pieces. After these, if you still have a taste, try reading "If, My Darling;" "At thirty-one, when some are rich;" "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" and "Dockery and Son." From there, I think it is all downhill--not far and not horribly; but downhill nonetheless.

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:

"stumbling up the breathless stair/ To burst into fulfillment's desolate attic."

"sat through days of thin continuous dreaming;"

or, of Religion, "That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die."

He has a knack for reducing things, for articulating the non-participant's, curmudgeonly perspective, complete with well-deployed informal profanity. He atomizes adornment, ceremony and cheerfulness, holding them by the tips of his fingers, as if they reek.

It entertains me that he describes three married couples as follows:

"Adder-faced singularity
Espouses a nailed-up childhood,
Skin-disease pardons
Soft horror of living,
A gabble is forgiven
By chronic solitude."

It entertains me because it is typical of him to reduce people to their worst, and typical that he goes on to rob these unions of their romance by depicting them all "tarnish[ing] at quiet anchor." In Larkin's poetry, context will always get you in the end. Senility beckons, death looms, promises are already breaking and every man outmaneuvers himself in an effort to avoid the fear of all that is failed and meaningless.

Still, it's good fun. He's one of the most winning grouches I remember reading and was probably an excellent drunk.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Larkin's poetry is so smooth and so pleasing to the eye and mind that it seems effortless to read and contain within yourself. A Larkin poem seems so perfectly said and put together that one feels his elegant arrangement came to him in a flash of inspiration. Probably not so. I think he struggled with poems for years, just like other poets. But he struggled with grace, or at least the end result is graceful. He's Auden-like in that way. That word again, his poetry is elegant in the same way Auden's poetry is elegant. Some poets are elegant thinkers, some simply write astonishingly elegant lines. Larkin did both. His verbal precision, the way his lines flow to the right thought and rhyme will take a reader's breath away. He doesn't spray words on the page with a fire hose, as someone once said of Frank O'Hara. Larkin is a surgeon of words, the perfect one placed just so to create the right cadence and tone. I don't know how many times I've red these Collected Poems. A few times. Coming back is always a pleasure. Each time I seem to find a new favorite, this time "The Mower" in which he laments the killing of a hedgehog while mowing the lawn. His regret will break your heart. "Next morning I get up and it did not." And this man who worked hard at being a curmudgeon ends with a message embedded in much of his poetry: "....we should be careful of each other, we should be kind while there is still time."

[Rhys · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only discovered the poetry of Philip Larkin three weeks ago and already I have read every poem he published (apart from some juvenilia). He wasn't very prolific, which made the task easier. Not that it really was a task: it was a pleasure. What a superb poet! This volume of his collected poems is one of the very best books of poetry I have read.

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was given a copy of this book by my parents. (No, really! I am not making this up!) I'm afraid I'm still in shock... may have a comment by 2011 if the therapy works out.

[Theo Austin-Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

To top off a rather bitter and heartless month I figured I might as well seek comfort in the quotidian blue of Larkin, seeing as how his concerns seemed to, with the cruel twists of fate or contingency (dealer’s choice regarding whichever term you prefer when naming a moribund series of events), become much my own. Illness, degradation, the vacuous sterile mediocrity of hospital hallways, the indifference of nature which stirs without, ever (perhaps always-already) failing relationships, the saving power of love which lays like skin and hair near the plughole of affects. It is brilliant to see how such plain speech and common idioms can be sharpened into the greatest heartbreak. I mean just look at the pedestrian beginning of The Mower, or at the careful spectator who writes An Arundel Tomb and catalogues the aspects of said tomb. All very normal. And by the end we are met with what we would often, if we had not followed the stanzas, so easily dismiss as absolute drivel, tripe, bollocks, platitudes that wouldn’t deserve a second look. But they both earn their power, and the saccharine somehow, unaccountably, gives way to the soft biting nature of the bittersweet, to something that claws at the essence. I’ll leave both their ending lines below, and you’ll see how ridiculous they look in the broad light of day outside of their context.

The Mower

The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

An Arundel Tomb

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

It puts me in mind of what Maugham wrote in his Cakes and Ale, a quote that has stuck with me for weeks now:
“I stifled a sigh. I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.”

Anyway, all I want to say is I have no fucking clue why This Be The Verse is his most famous poem. What a load of shite.

[jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

A disgusting tory whose hateful views were a less savory expression of the misanthropic, dour and essentially frightened attitude that allowed Larkin to write verse of legitimately heart-rending perceptiveness and lyrical beauty on the sour lot of living. So much of me rebels against him, but the spirit of melancholy I so often find myself attuned to had in Larkin an advocate of genius, something I can't ignore, even as I wish I could. May he rot, as we all must, more or less deservedly, and may his work at least console those who suffer life and death as he did, while rising above the sad and destructive temptations of hateful prejudice to which he succumbed.

[Hakan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the wars and winters
Missing behind the windows
Of an opaque childhood.

[Anima · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Arundel Tomb
"...
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone finality
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love."

Whatever Happened?

"At once whatever happened starts receding.
Panting, and back on board, we line the rail
With trousers ripped, light wallets, and lips bleeding.

Yes, gone, thank God! Remembering each detail
We toss for half the night, but find next day
All's kodak-distant. Easily, then (though pale),

'Perspective brings significance,' we say,
Unhooding our photometers, and, snap!
What can't be printed can be thrown away.

Later, it's just a latitude: the map
Points out how unavoidable it was:
'Such coastal bedding always means mishap.'

Curses? The dark? Struggling? Where's the source
Of these yarns now (except in nightmares, of course)?"

Poetry Of Departures

"Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It's specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you ****;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect."

Forget What Did

"Stopping the diary
Was a stun to memory,
Was a blank starting,

One no longer cicatrized
By such words, such actions
As bleakened waking.

l wanted them over.
Hurried to burial
And looked back on

Like the wars and winters
Missing behind the Windows
of an opaque childhood.

And the empty pages?
Should they ever be filled
Let it be with observed

Celestial recurrences,
The day the flowers come.
And when the birds go."

[Wendy Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

Major themes: death, regret, the futility of existence, isn't everything so depressing, and what's even the point of it all? Not exactly light reading, but still worth reading.

My personal favourites, in chronological order:
* Next, Please: about death, which is memorably depicted as a ship in whose wake "no waters breed or break"
* Triple Time: also death, in a way; the passage of time, and regrets
* 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.)
* 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.
* Ambulances: another one about death, this time using an ambulance as the primary motif.
* 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.
Aubade: yet another poem on death, juxtaposed with a portrayal of a life which scarcely seems any better. Not exactly cheerful.

[Meem Arafat Manab · Rating 5 out of 5]

পড়লাম এক মাস ধরে, আস্তে ধীরে। আমার হাতে এই বই যখন আসে, তখন নামও মনে হয় শুনি নাই আমি লারকিনের, তারপর মাস গেলো, বছর গেলো, আমি ভুলে গেছি, এই বই কই পাওয়া, কিন্তু এর মাঝে বইটা আগের চেয়েও শাদাটে, নিস্তেজ হয়ে গেছে, লারকিনের কবিতার এই ফটোকপিরে এখন দেখলে মনে হয়, সে যেনো লারকিনের ফটোকপির ফটোকপিরও ফটোকপি না, অক্ষরগুলি প্রায় নাই নাই, কে জানে কখনো ছিলো কী না।

লারকিনের কবিতার মতই। প্রথম দিকের কবিতাগুলি ত খুব বেশি লোকের ভালো হয় না, যদি না প্রথম কবিতা লিখে সে নিরুদ্দেশে পা দেয় - এই লোকের প্রথম কবিতাগুলিও খুব বেশি ভালো লাগে নাই, খারাপও না, কয়েকটা ভালো, এদ্দূরই, দ্বিতীয় বইটা বরং কিছুটা একঘেয়ে, কোনোমতে গিলে দৌঁড়ে চলে গেছি। এরপর আসে তিন নম্বর, আর অব্যবহিত পরেই চার নম্বর, শুভ্র সঙিন দুইটা বই।

নিস্তেজ, শাদাটে, তীব্র রকম আকর্ষণীয়, ভাস্কর চক্রবর্তীর মত কবিতা, রাস্তা আর বাসেট্রেনে বসে থাকা আর কুকুরের বমি নিয়ে কবিতা, একটু উদাসীন, যখন উদাসীন না তখন একটু কড়কে দেয়, এক ধরনের আন্ধার রসজ্ঞান, আমার অবশ্য ভালো লাগে, লাগলো, উদাসীনগুলাই, এক জীবন ভাস্কর পড়ে কেটে গেছে, এক জীবন আরো কেটে যাবে লারকিন পড়ে, অল্প কয়েকটা কবিতা, ভালো লাগলো তার অর্দ্ধেকেরও কম, কিন্তু সেই অর্দ্ধেকেরও কম যে কী এক নাগপাশসমেত আসে আর ধরে, মাথাটারে খেয়ে দিয়ে যায়, গেলো, পুরোপুরি।

আরো পড়তে হবে, বহুদিন। যদ্দিন সরোজিনী না ফেরে।

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poet. Here's why:

For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

--"Church Going"

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

I must confess: I do not like the early work of Larkin; his craftmenship is clear, but the subjects he's is writing about, aren't interisting at all. The later work is much more appealing, although his opinion on life, love and especially children is very dark and sobering. He seems to have been a very bitter old man.

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

Larkin’s kind of a sneaky writer, no? So many poems that begin with vulgar disappointment break into movingly beautiful images in the final lines (just re-read High Windows, a favourite of mine, to see what I mean)

[brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

best poet of the twentieth century? easy. just read Aubade and try and dispute that fact. or The Old Fools. goddamn. "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." yes, indeed.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Collected Poems by Philip Larkin

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.

With that said, here are a few poems which I really enjoyed:

1. Two Guitar Pieces - a glimpse of a city while traveling through

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.

3. Dublinesque - describing a funeral procession through Dublin

4. Heads in the Women's Ward - a stark view on old age

5. The Mower - an incident with a hedgehog reminds the author to appreciate life and kindness.

So overall this collection feels dated. Although these poems were written in the mid 20th century, most read like they written in the late 19th century. I have given half a star more because collections of poetry are not fair to the poet since the poems are cherry-picked and the themes are all mashed together.

3.5 stars

[Stephanie Sun · Rating 4 out of 5]

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):

It is strange how much Larkin’s images of disillusion, fear, and self-betrayal have come to seem communal rather than personal, how the England he imagined—the drinking, the absences, the lost love, and the daily dread—have etched themselves into the general image of things. Thus many writers who dramatize English life have to tackle not only the substance of the world they inhabit or imagine, but the persistent shadows that Larkin left. While this has happened elsewhere—in Burns’s Scotland, for example, or Whitman’s America, or Yeats’s Ireland—it has come as a release, or a way of opening up the world. In the case of Larkin’s England, it comes with the sense of an ending, or, as he put it at the conclusion of “The Whitsun Weddings,” “somewhere becoming rain.”

The ending lines of The Whitsun Weddings were also the subject, famously, of one of Ian McEwan and Christopher Hitchens' last conversations:

"I set the poem up and read it, and when I reached that celebrated end, “A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain,’ Christopher murmured from his bed, “That’s so dark, so horribly dark.” I disagreed, and not out of any wish to lighten his mood. Surely, the train journey comes to an end, the recently married couples are dispatched toward their separate fates. He wouldn’t have it, and a week later, when I was back in London, we were still exchanging e-mails on the subject. One of his began, “Dearest Ian, Well, indeed – no rain, no gain – but it still depends on how much anthropomorphizing Larkin is doing with his unconscious … I’d provisionally surmise that “somewhere becoming rain” is unpromising.’"

I bought Collected Poems shortly after reading that Toibin review. I read all of the famous ones (The Whitsun Weddings, Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album, Annus Mirabilis, Dockery and Son); made a few discoveries of my own (Sad Steps, Nursery Tale); and then shelved it with my small collection of poetry books.

Reading it front to back over the course of this past week and a half, and shortly after reading the disappointing Time and Materials by Larkin antimatter Robert Hass, one is struck by both the monumentality of formal accomplishment and the almost laughably bleak outlook. Larkin's glass is not only half-empty, the part that is not empty is soon-to-be empty, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a vapid nobody blinding themselves to Truth.

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:

Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

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

But he is TOO MUCH. Here is the blessing he gives to his friend's baby:

May you be ordinary
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,

Here is what a box of kittens for sale makes him think of:

Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel -
Mam, we're playing funerals now.

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 poem 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.

I loved this book, but it left me, ironically, wanting to run out into the world and embrace life and everything beautiful in it. Because sometimes a box of kittens is just a box of kittens. And rain? What do you think glasses get filled with in the first place?

[Ginny Darke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would be 5* but I just checked and the Philip Larkin society doesn't follow me on Instagram anymore. Their loss.