Philip Larkin

One of the best-known and best-loved poets of the English-speaking world, Philip Larkin had only a small number of poems published during his lifetime. Collected Poems brings together not only all his books--The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings, and High Windows--but also his uncollected poems from 1940 to 1984. This new edition reflects Larkin's own ordering for his poems and is the first collection to present the body of his work with the organization he preferred. Preserving everything he published in his lifetime, the new Collected Poems is an indispensable contribution to the legacy of an icon of twentieth-century poetry.

Collected Poems

Larkin's final collection of poems shows, as does all his best work, his ability to adapt contemporary speech rhythms and everyday vocabulary to subtle metrical patterns and poetic forms. Many of the poems in the collection, which includes some of his best-known pieces ('The Old Fools', 'This Be the Verse', 'The Explosion', and the title poem) show the preoccupation with death and transience that is so typical of the poet.

High Windows

The most cherished of poets, Philip Larkin is a writer with an unrivalled ability to touch readers with his evocations of English life. The Whitsun Weddings, his first volume with Faber and Faber, was published in 1964. This Faber Modern Classics edition includes a foreword by Alan Johnson MP. 'Larkin, with his (in the best sense) provincial eye, and his unparalleled ear, is the supreme writer of post-war England.' Telegraph 'Larkin's originality is palpable . . . Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never 'depressing'.' Martin Amis

The Whitsun Weddings

'It will, I hope, still qualify for the indulgence traditionally extended to juvenilia,' wrote Philip Larkin, almost twenty years after the publication of his first novel. But Jill, with its exact evocation of place - Oxford in 1940 - and astute insight into character, emotions and social nuance, requires no such indulgence. It is a classic of its time, and shows many of the qualities that were later to distinguish Larkin's great, mature poetry.'Jill is, in a sense, a kind of cryptic manifesto. It is a novel about writing, about discovering a literary personality, and about the sorts of consolation that art can provide.' Andrew Motion

Jill

Selected by Martin Amis, this book draws on Philip Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems.

Poems Selected by Martin Amis

A Girl in Winter

This entirely new edition brings together all of Philip Larkin's poems. In addition to those in Collected Poems (1988), and in the Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), some unpublished pieces from Larkin's typescripts and workbooks are included, as well as verse (by turns scurrilous, satirical, affectionate, and sentimental) tucked away in his letters. The manuscript and printed sources have been scrutinized afresh; more detailed accounts than hitherto available of the sources of the text and of dates of composition are provided; and previous accounts of composition dates have been corrected. Variant wordings from Larkin's typescripts and the early printings are recorded.For the first time, the poems are given a comprehensive commentary. This draws critically upon, and substantially extends, the accumulated scholarship on Larkin, and covers closely relevant historical contexts, persons and places, allusions and echoes, and linguistic usage. Due prominence is given to the poet's comments on his poems, which often outline the circumstances that gave rise to a poem, or state what he was trying to achieve. Larkin played down his literariness, but his poetry enrichingly alludes to and echoes the writings of many others; Archie Burnett's commentary establishes him as a more complex and more literary poet than many readers have suspected.

The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin

Whitsun Weddings (Faber Poetry)

Philip Larkin's second collection, The Less Deceived was published by The Marvell Press in 1955, and now appears for the first time in Faber covers.The eye can hardly pick them out From the cold shade they shelter in, Till wind distresses tail and mane; Then one crops grass, and moves about - The other seeming to look on - And stands anonymous again. from 'At Grass'

Less Deceived

A Novel

Zimowe królestwo

Poems

Ventanas altas

Required Writing

Further Requirements

A Record Diary, 1961-1971

All what Jazz

Associate Professor of Clinical Nursing Palliative Care Philip Larkin

The North Ship, a book of poems, Philip Larkin's earliest volume of verse, was first published in August 1945. The introduction, by Larkin himself, explains the circumstances of its publication and the influences which shaped its contents.

The North Ship

Philip Larkin was one of the most admired and loved English poets of the twentieth century. His Collected Poems has become essential reading on any bookshelf, covering his four published volumes and late work. But Larkin was a prolific writer in his youth, and wrote over two hundred and fifty poems in the years leading up to his first collection. Drawing on the pamphlets, manuscripts and workbooks from 1938 to 1946-46, the Early Poems reveals, for the first time, the formative writings and literary origins of this most gifted of poets.

Philip Larkin

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