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

Adam Scharf

Thwaite has based the whole edition on the carefully preserved and dated notebooks and typescripts left by Larkin.

Katherine Yang

bring to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here

(I suspect I may not have cherished this so much if it hadn't been taught to me by my teacher.)

Gavin

In one sentence: The apotheosis of perverse contentment or British miserabilism: Housman, if honest about his appetites; Lawrence with a sense of humour; Auden plus even more jazz..

 To be read when: ill, heartbroken, very young, quite old, too cynical, too hopeful.


Of the consuming fear of death, sexual frustration, impostor syndrome: Britain.

He was forever overawed by lack of control over his life; we are left with his superlative control of form. Motifs are well-known: the hostile wind heard from the cold attic; the diminishing of strength; the fall of desire without a fall in the desire to desire; the conviction that age is not running out of time, but running out of self. These are not moans: he loves jazz and booze and other things that make death recede. He’s vulgar, and wields it, but never as punchline; what starts “Groping back to bed after a piss” will end with the universe :


  

   The hardness and the brightness and plain
 far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
 Is a reminder of the strength and the pain
 Of being young; that it can’t come again,
 But is for others undiminished somewhere. 



There’s too much in this volume. I mean that as criticism of its editor, not as expression of Larkin’s o’erflowing sublimity. But that too, actually: “Sad Steps”, “Aubade”, “For Sidney Bechet”, "No Road", and “Continuing to Live” are among my favourites.

By ’72 his bitterness and fear had overcome his kindness, and he dried up, leaving doggerel for mates and nasty biz like “The Old Fools” or “The Card Players”. And yet even after three years of this came “Aubade”. 

I avoided the juvenilia, perhaps even out of superstitious respect.


 
    Galef type: 


Data 3 - that highlight patterns in the world , &


 Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker.

Annotation This new edition of Larkin's poems for the first time presents his four published books, The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows in their original sequence.

Roger Amundsen

Will Vunderink

Seth Kalback

Joshua Line

Jacob Mishook

liz mcclaran

Since its publication in 1988, Philip Larkin's Collected Poems has become essential reading on any poetry bookshelf. This new edition returns to Larkin's own deliberate ordering of his poems, presenting, in their original sequence, his four published books: The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. It also includes an appendix of poems that Larkin published in other places, from his juvenilia to his final years - some of which might have appeared in a late book, if he had lived. Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this new Collected Poems returns the reader to the book Larkin might have intended.

Collected Poems

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