Collected Poems

'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.

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.

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.