Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin (1922-1985), English poet and novelist. Larkin was born in Coventry, and educated at St John's College, Oxford University, where he studied English. From 1943 he worked as a librarian in Shropshire, Leicester, and Belfast, eventually moving to Hull in 1955, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life; his contribution to the modernizing and maintenance of the University of Hull library, which he oversaw from 1955 until his final illness, was a process which made the library the centrepiece of the university.

Larkin published two novels: Jill (1946), set in wartime Oxford, and A Girl in Winter (1947), which relates a day in the life of a librarian. Another novel, which he worked on for five years, was never completed. He edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), and a selection of his essays and interviews, Required Writing, was published in 1983. During the 1950s he was associated with the poets and novelists of The Movement, a loose grouping of poets including Thom Gunn, Kingsley Amis, D. J. Enright, and Donald Davie. Larkin also became a jazz records reviewer for the Daily Telegraph in 1961, and his collected writings on jazz, All What Jazz, were published in 1970.

Larkin's earliest poems were published in a pamphlet, XX Poems (1951), and The North Ship (1945), a collection greatly influenced by both W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden and one which shows Larkin struggling to find his own voice. In his next collection, The Less Deceived (1955), Larkin's unique combination of the colloquial and the ruminative begins to emerge in poems such as “Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album”, “Church Going”, “Toads”, and “I Remember, I Remember”.

Two later collections, The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974), extended the range if not the tone of his poetry, engaging with politics (in “Homage to a Government”), topography (in “Here” and “The Importance of Elsewhere”), and history and ancestry (in “MCMXIV” and “Dockery and Son”).

Although there have been fierce disputes since the 1950s as to Larkin's stature and significance in English poetry, critics do generally agree that Larkin's work presents a distinctive view of life, a world-view which the poet and critic Alan Brownjohn describes in these terms: “As a poet he has taken as his themes such things as the gap between human hope and cold reality; the illusory nature of choice in life; frustration with one's lot in a present which is dismal, and in the face of a future which brings only age and death.” But there are widely divergent interpretations of the astuteness and value of Larkin's perspectives. To some, Larkin's views are admirably honest and comforting, while to others they are insulting and depressing. Larkin's poetry has often been criticized for what the poet and critic Donald Davie called its “lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations”, and since the publication of Larkin's correspondence in 1992, there have been claims that the racism and misogyny he espouses in some of the letters must necessarily have influenced his poetry and thus call into question the integrity of his vision as a poet.

Such criticisms, while possibly valid, tend to avoid any detailed discussion of the language of Larkin's poetry, which is both extraordinarily flexible and quietly ambitious. He is, for example, a great phrase-maker: “What will survive of us is love” (“An Arundel Tomb”); “It becomes still more difficult to find/ Words at once true and kind,/ Or not untrue and not unkind” (“Talking in Bed”); “Life is first boredom, then fear” (“Dockery and Son”).

In his contemplation of his own sense of isolation he often managed to express a complex sense of baffled yearning and despair, as in these final lines from “High Windows”:

He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1965, a CBE in 1975, and made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1978. In 1984 he was offered the poet laureateship, an honour which he declined. A Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite, was published in 1988.