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Collected Poems

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In five years, nine Larkinites have posted reviews to these pages. One laments the death of poetry's ability to move the masses, laments the lost world in which poetry was a master art, in which Longfellow might hold a theater in thrall with tales of Gitchee Gumee.

Why doesn't everyone who reads in the English Language know Philip Larkin?

Oh, this Larkin is most assuredly not for every taste--he is ugly, rueful, bitter, timorous, and in these he is wholly and perfectly one with his poetic voice. He is a formalist--a large quantity of rhymed iambic pentameter at a time when most "poetry" is indistinguishable from prose except in the way the lines are arranged--who sounds, miraculously, astonishingly, colloquial (the particular mark of his genius). Many of these poems attain a perfection--Aubade, High Windows, This Be The Verse, others, all relatively well known--that literally staggers the imagination. As with the (classic) jazz to which Larkin was so devoted, in which the players continually found "new" notes to blow, and even created new musical vocabularies when the old ones were exhausted, Larkin finds boundless new resources inside the English language and then bursts poetry's integument asunder when his straightlaced, albeit eccentric, formalism seems to hem him in.

Unlike most contemporary poets, Larkin creates lines you remember--indeed, cannot shake--and want to memorize for the delight, and mortification, of self and friends.

Larkin does not, by the bye, deal in any manner of obscurantism. What he means is clearly on the page. It may not leave you in the sunniest of dispositions, but it will lift you, powerfully, to another level of poetic appreciation.

This is a book for life by the major voice of my time.

As often happens, Amazon's practice of cross-posting reviews and information specific to _one_ edition of a book on all the webpages for _all_ of that book's editions causes confusion. There are in fact significant differences between the 2004 paperback edition of this superb poet's collected work and the earlier edition of 1989/1993 (hardcover/paperback). Each edition has its merits.

The earlier edition was more comprehensive, including many poems unpublished during Larkin's life. Some of those unpublished poems were inferior to Larkin's previously published work; perhaps half of them were not. (Many of the unpublished poems' states of completion are difficult to determine, a fact acknowledged by the editor.) The poems in the earlier edition are sequenced chronologically in two sections, a primary section of poems written after Larkin began publishing, followed by a smaller section of early poems.

The newer edition eliminates many of the less satisfying of the poems unpublished by Larkin. Strikingly, the newer edition also has been rearranged to reflect the orderings Larkin chose for his few collections. (Notes in the back of the older edition listed by title the order of poems in each prior collection.) These changes make the newer volume better for the casual reader of Larkin, but less useful for the student.

Philip Larkin once remarked that he felt the poet should take the reader by the hand and lead them right into the poem. Maybe that is just another way of saying that his poems are accessible and will touch you even when reading them for the first time.

Yes, Larkin does embody the somewhat grumpy spirit of post-war Britain, but like all good poetry they are about the something that seems to be missing in our lives. There are some feelings no writer has ever put more precisely. Formally rather conservative (rhyme, no daring metaphors), the vocabulary is utterly down to earth. "Talking in bed should be easiest," Larkin begins, only to find out that with the lengthening of the silence "It becomes stil more difficult to find / Words at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind."

The feelings expressed may not always be nice, nor is this much of a self-help book, so it is utterly opposed to the spirit of our times, but this "old-type natural fouled up-guy" will make you love poetry if you are not yet sure about whether your do ("to prove our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love.") Get this European poet looking at himself as if he were a complete stranger as a contrast to you confessional poets!

Larkin frequently adopts the persona of the very ordinary man in the street to explore his themes. As a consequence, his poetic language is that of the public bar rather than the literary salon; it is derived from Anglo-Saxon, not Latin or Greek. He is not, for example, averse to using expletives such as "crap" or the "f-word" when moved to despair or fury. The adopted, (or is it Larkin himself?) down-to-earth voice has a colloquially dismissive tone to it, his cyclist in "Church Going", for example, refers to the altar being, "up at the holy end", as he wanders about the building, "bored and uninformed", observing the, "brass and stuff." Equally, in "Poetry of departures", he refers to an acquaintance who has abandoned the conventional life as having, "chucked up everything and just cleared off". This is a man with an educational deficit, who thinks, "books are a load of crap" ("A study of reading habits"), while at the same time, and somewhat slyly, making it clear that he is aware of the existence of words such as "pyx" and "rood lofts," even if he doesn't know the precise meaning of them. However, the reader is only temporarily fooled by this apparent simple-mindedness. Larkin's man in the street is quite capable of profound thought, as is made abundantly clear in the final stanzas. The poems move from a flippant start toward an unanticipated gravitas, where weighty matters are analysed and ex cathedra pronouncements uttered. Larkin's longer poems move, in a tightly controlled manner, toward that cerebral ending. In "Church Going" for example, the rather boorish cyclist, after fooling about at the lectern, begins musing on the uses to which churches might be put in the future. He concludes with a stanza, which attempts to define the possible reasons for the continuation of religious sentiment, or something akin to it. The language, for the most part, remains fairly simple, but includes the obscure word "blent" and the phrase, "robed as destinies," These, along with the triple repetition of "serious", have the effect of creating a weighty tone, entirely in keeping with the subject matter. We are drawn into Larkin's poems by the intriguing banality of the initial focus, along with that very ordinary voice. The endings, however, leave us thinking.

'Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.'

If you were to look for a central theme in Larkin's poetry, these lines might be it. Larkin constantly grapples with the tragedy of everyday existence and the final inevitability of death, not with rebellion, but with a quiet and honest acceptance. I think this is what sets his poetry apart, that he never shies from unpleasant reality or rebels against it with false bluster or bravado. Larkin constantly comes across in his poems as an old or aging man, but one who with his experience can see the world stripped of all false hopes and illusion. This clarity of observation and expression gives his poetry its power.

Without a doubt Philip Larkin is one of the most loved and most respected poets in the English language. And all you have to do is read his poems to understand why. He has technical mastery, a command of the English language, and he speaks to all of us not just the professors and intellectuals. And there are any number of poems of his that are wonderful and that we can all love. Here are just a few of my favorites:

Traumerei; At Grass; Mother, Summer, I; Reasons for Attendance; I Remember, I Remember; Church Going; Maiden Name; First Sight; The Whitsun Weddings; Letter to a Friend about Girls; Faith Healing; High Windows; Sympathy in White Major; This Be the Verse (my absolute favorite); Cut Grass; The Old Fools; Morning at last: there in the snow; The little lives of earth and form; and Aubade.

Read him and you'll love him too.

An 'elderly reclusive bachelor', a friend of mine who fancies himself a Larkin clone, introduced me to this wonderous book and to the life of this most interesting poet. I am deeply grateful to both my friend and to his hero. "This Be the Verse" is Larkin's most famous poem if only for the directness of its language and the economy of its expression. The poem begins: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to , but they do. " Upon reading this opening my adult daughters cheered wildly - someone had finally understood their plight. As they fancy children I encouraged reading to the closing couplet: "Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself." This stunned them, as it had me in my turn. Imagine the creative despair of Larkin's: "Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf." Ain't it the truth!A second favourite of mine, "If, My Darling" invites the reader to 'jump' inside the poet's head to view the psychic interior of one who sees "the past is past and the future neuter". Take the trip inside Larkin's poetr - short incursions are all I can handle, three poems at a time with ample time to reflect and to recover before entering this volume for the next disquieting. No poet has reached me like Larkin. He knows the grief at the center of the soul and coveys it with grace and with compassion for us all.

Larkin is a great poet whose Collected Poems are the most exciting body of work to come out of post-war England. Despite his famously small output, the number of poems of great renown is very large, "The Whitsun Weddings", "An Arundel Tomb", "Mr Bleaney", "Sunny Prestatyn", "Letter to a friend about girls", "High Windows", "Love Again" among several others. Other poets have bigger names, Auden in the world, Betjeman in England, Heaney even, but their poems are not nearly so intimately known. The usual reason for this is the education syllabus, which ensures the position of, say, Frost or Shakespeare (both of whom are, of course, great) but Larkin is only grudgingly anthologised in school volumes in England even and rarely taught. Why the intimacy then? Because Larkin spoke the truth, or you could say he spoke true. His diction was everyday idiom: we are advised to "Get stewed", he himself is "fouled-up", his friend has a job "To pay for the kiddies' clobber". But never at the expense of the poetry. Baudelaire viewing "Les Desmoiselles D'Avignon" in progress in Picassos' studio regretted the inability of the writer to invent his own words compared with Picasso's intrepid laying out of a new painterly vocabulory. Larkin's enormous poetic ability and equally large artistic integrity allowed him to use the everyday speech of his generation absolutely as it should be used. His narratives fitted this situation allowing him to invent that language and for it to be immediately understood by everyone. His concerns are the concerns of every sensible man, girls, booze, jaz, money, the destruction caused by the population boom, the theatre of other people's lives and of history viewed from a safe distance - that is the spectacle of life without the cost of privacy. These are all intimate concerns to everybody. But he says it beautifully and well and concisely and memorably and everything he says rings with truth and reason. He has that portion of sensibility that everyone can respect. We can all be thankful for Larkin's memorable diagnosis of the 20th century human condition.

Philip Larkin's weltschmertz and English dreariness were too much for most Brits to swallow, so it's understandable that his modest literary fame never extended outside of the UK. The poems here are arranged in chronological order, which allow the reader to see when the solitary Hull librarian began to make a linguistic departure in his poems.

Critics and casual readers alike have often remarked at Larkin's blatant use of obscenities, particularly in 'This Be the Verse', which begins 'They f#@k you up, your mum and dad, they don't mean to, but they do'. Larkin viewed his use of vulgarity as tying in with the language of the time, to the talk and behaviour that were especially rapid, exciting and unavoidable during the counter-culture zeitgeist of the late '60's and early '70's. The sudden 'f@#k' and 'crap' with which Larkin begins some poems from this epoch often contrast with the elevated diction and stately rhythms of the poems' final stanzas. For example, 'This Be the Verse' ends with '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 gap in diction between the beginning and the end of 'This Be the Verse', as well as most of the poems on 'High Windows' is a generation gap. Larkin was a man who felt estranged when he saw two sixteen-year-olds necking in public, and one of the ways he reacts in that poem is to move into, and then out from under, their language.

Larkin does this again in the poem, and my personal favourite, 'High Windows', which begins 'When I see a couple of kids, and guess he's f@#king her and she's wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise'. The word 'f@#cking' in 'High Windows' sounds aggressive, like a smear on the girl and perhaps also on the boy in the poem. But this pejorative effect is reversed when, further into the poem, the word gets reclassified as high praise :'I know this is paradise'. What sounds early on like simple resentment or jealousy modulates into jealous admiration. And, like 'This Be the Verse', the poem's denouement is a complete deviation in diction from the opening stanza's 'Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, and beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless'. Just like 'This Be the Verse', its ending is more traditionally 'poetic'. The subcultural indicators, then, can only be part of the force.

Also recommended is Andrew Motion's biography of the petulant poet.

The poetry explores themes of love, loss, loneliness, death, aging, and everything in between. Larkin unashamedly uses rhymes and iambic pentameters in modern times when these structures are considered out-dated and gauche. However, they only draw the reader deeper in the (deceptively) easy lines of the poems, lines which once you read, you could not shake off for the rest of your life.

Larkin hasn't been the most prolific writer and what he writes is usually short, terse poems. He's bitter, selfish, and trapped in his own world but yet he is like Prufrock, the readers grow to love him, to empathize with him.

The poems, arranged in chronological order, shows Larkin's progression as a poet.