The very first poem in this collection (Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album) presents some of the challenge of Larkin: his writing is beautiful, his observations insightful (“But o, photography! as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing…”), but sometimes he comes across as a bit of an ‘incel’. It’s hard to get on board with the speaker who explains he stole a photo of a woman sunbathing to keep for himself. However, hard as that is (not to mention his other troubling views), there is something brilliant about his writing.

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.” Lines 52-54: “For, though I've no idea / What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, / It pleases me to stand in silence here;” Despite his wide popularity, Larkin “shied from publicity, rarely consented to interviews or readings, cultivated his image as right-wing curmudgeon and grew depressed at his fame,” according to J.D. McClatchyin the New York Times Book Review. Phoenixcontributor Alun R. Jones suggests that, as librarian at the remote University of Hull, Larkin “avoided the literary, the metropolitan, the group label, and embraced the nonliterary, the provincial, and the purely personal.” From his base in Hull, Larkin composed poetry that both reflected the dreariness of postwar provincial England and voiced the spiritual despair of the modern age. McClatchy notes Larkin wrote “in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires.” Critics feel that this localization of focus and the colloquial language used to describe settings and emotions endear Larkin to his readers. Agendareviewer George Dekker noted that no living poet “can equal Larkin on his own ground of the familiar English lyric, drastically and poignantly limited in its sense of any life beyond, before or after, life today in England.”I suspect much of my neglect may be due to my knee-jerk preferences in mid-century verse: I favor the American over the British, the surrealist over the rhetorical, the bi-polar over the cynical. But I suspect there are other reasons that run deeper. For years, you see, I strove to be playful, guileless, and ardent. This was hard work at times, and required a steady diet of denial. Larkin, ever parsimonious, wrote very few poems during the last decade of his life: Collected Poems reveals a mere seventeen. Many of those concern themselves with his standard topics—the ravages of age, the sense of not being in step with the rest of society, the approach of death. In “The Mower,” for example, he ruminates on having run over a hedgehog in the tall grass, killing it. From this experience, he takes away a feeling of responsibility for the death, a sense of the loss of this fellow creature, and the reflection that, given our limited time, we should be kind to one another. This slight poem (eleven lines) sums up much of Larkin’s thought in his later years: Death is a complete cessation of experience, not a transmutation but a blankness, an end, while life itself is a vale of unhappiness, and people therefore owe it to themselves and one another to make the way as pleasant as possible.

Philip Larkin said on more than one occasion that his discovery of Thomas Hardy's poetry was a turning point in the writing of his own poetry: "I don't think Hardy, as a poet, is a poet for young people. I know it sounds ridiculous to say I wasn't young at twenty-five or twenty-six, but at least I was beginning to find out what life was about, and that's precisely what I found in Hardy. In other words, I'm saying that what I like about him primarily is his temperament and the way he sees life. He's not a transcendental writer, he's not a Yeats, he's not an Eliot; his subjects are men, the life of men, time and the passing of time, love and the fading of love... Larkin is often described as ‘anti-Modernist’, but some of his poems could also be called ‘anti-Romantic’, e.g. I Remember, I Remember, where he recalls the place he grew up in, where he ‘wasn’t spoken to by an old hat’; and yet there is no bitterness against the place where his childhood was ‘unspent’, for that bitterness would itself be a form of romanticism. This is a very short collection (not Larkin's first, but the first one he liked), and I would not wish any of these twenty-nine sharply crafted lyrics away. The title is a reference to Hamlet (Ophelia, when Hamlet says he never loved her, replies “I was the more deceived”) and most of the poems here deal in some way with deception. All of us fall prey to it, Larkin believes, but the sufferer is invariably “less deceived” than her oppressor who, filled with desire—specifically lust in the poem “Deception”--ends up deluded and filled with sadness: “stumbling up the breathless stair/ to burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.” Indeed Larkin can be eloquent--and daring--on the subject of lust, as he is in “Dry Point”:

Book contents

The first two stanzas examine the ways the building in which the speaker sits resembles so many other modern buildings—high-rise hotels, airport lounges—although there is something disturbingly unlike them, as well. Not until the end of the second stanza does he reveal that it is a hospital. What unites people here is the common knowledge of their own mortality; even if they are not to die immediately, they are forced by the place to confront the fact that they will die eventually. The inescapability of that knowledge tames and calms the people in the building, as once the knowledge of death and its aftermath quieted them in church. His ponderances on the fate of churches when the religion they were built to serve is gone remind of Nietzsche’s madman, who claimed that cathedrals were now only graves and sepulchres for the dead God. Here Larkin’s cynicism about the way in which our culture is headed is evident, yet paradoxically he is a product of that culture. Philip Larkin (1922–1985) also published other poems. They, along with the contents of the four published collections, are included in the 2003 edition of his Collected Poems in two appendices. The previous 1988 edition contains everything that appears in the 2003 edition and additionally includes all the known mature poems that he did not publish during his lifetime, plus an appendix of early work. To help differentiate between these published and unpublished poems in our table all poems that appear in the 2003 edition's appendices are listed as Collected Poems 2003; of course, they also appear in the 1988 volume. Wait! I almost forgot the best bit, apart from Scanlan’s flawless evocation of the charming creep who represents Ophelia’s first exposure to a so-far-ineradicable toxic species that she will find lining her path through life, even if she is never so susceptible to it again. Anyway, yes, Paul Mescal is in it! The Deceived was filmed just after Normal People, but before it aired, so he has a little less to do here than you might expect. He plays Sean, the village builder and volunteer firefighter who finds Roisin’s body and then takes a shine to Michael’s new house guest, and does it as credibly and creditably as you would presume.

My favorite poem in this collection, I think, is the seemingly slight lyric "Coming." Larkin is the kind of poet who bares his soul not directly, but indirectly, in ostensibly offhand remarks and sidelong glances. Rather than straightforwardly asserting, "Childhood, to me, is a forgotten boredom," he starts a sentence in this way: "I, whose childhood is a forgotten boredom,..." The effect is all the more piercing: we, the readers, are so blindsided that we swallow Larkin's bombshell of a confession whole. We think, "How refreshing it is to hear a post-Wordsworth poet say that childhood to him is a forgotten boredom!" And this is why the ending of the poem works as well as it does: it startles us to discover that this poet, who found his childhood to be boring and forgettable, is nevertheless able to describe childhood's emotions with such heartfelt and unadorned precision. (In fact, the poem's ending startles us in exactly the same way that springtime startles the poem's speaker; the poem enacts what it is describing.)Monica Jones photographed by Philip Larkin on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, 1971. Photograph: Philip Larkin archive Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer. Edited texts: New Poems, 1958 (with Louis MacNeice and Bonamy Dobrée); The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse, 1973.