Philip Larkin: Collected Poems

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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’. 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. 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... 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;”. 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.”

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.The list of poems by Philip Larkin come mostly from the four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime: [1] [2] 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. 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. The gold-titted mirage of the armada, and the single ship hunting us. Like Google, Larkin at his best makes genius look easy. 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. 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). 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.” Our Family Station in St Pancras is open from 10.00-12.00 every Friday and we're continuing to welcome schools, as well as families and adult learners to our courses and access events. All our in-person and livestreamed events are going ahead. Other services That "local girls' school" is a quintessential Larkin detail, an interjection from his " Brunette Coleman" persona.

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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. 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. 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. 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.