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 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.” 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.

Much that is admirable in the best of [Larkin’s] work is felt [in Collected Poems]: firmness and delicacy of cadence, a definite geography, a mutually fortifying congruence between what the language means to say and what it musically embodies,” asserted Seamus Heaneyin the Observer.The collection contains Larkin’s six previous volumes of poetry as well as 83 of his unpublished poems gleaned from notebooks and homemade booklets. The earliest poems (which reflect the style and social concerns of W.H. Auden) date from his schooldays and the latest close to his death. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Books, Alan Shapiropointed out, “Reading the work in total, we can see how Larkin, early and late, is a poet of great and complex feeling.” Larkin “[endowed] the most commonplace objects and occasions with a chilling poignancy, [measuring] daily life with all its tedium and narrowness against the possibilities of feeling,” adds Shapiro. 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). 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. 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.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... That "local girls' school" is a quintessential Larkin detail, an interjection from his " Brunette Coleman" persona.

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. 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. 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.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.” Next, Please: about death, which is memorably depicted as a ship in whose wake "no waters breed or break"

If you want to see a little of Larkin's typical, sad style, try "Talking in Bed," "High Windows," and "Posterity," some of my favorites that will make you feel terrible as soon as you understand them. 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 ending lines of The Whitsun Weddings were also the subject, famously, of one of Ian McEwan and Christopher Hitchens' last conversations: 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. 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):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 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.)

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: 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. 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. Collected Poems is the title of a posthumous collection of Philip Larkin's poetry edited by Anthony Thwaite and published by Faber and Faber. He released two notably different editions in 1988 and 2003, the first of which also includes previously unpublished work. Both editions include the contents of Larkin's collections The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, plus other material.

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. 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: