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WELCOME TO
THE PHILIP LARKIN SOCIETY

Since The Philip Larkin Society was founded in 1995, ten years after the poet’s death, it has become a national and international focus for lovers of his writings.

The Society, a registered charity, provides a forum for the discussion of all aspects of Larkin’s work: as poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian. Our lively, illustrated Journal, About Larkin, mingles reviews and commentaries on the Society’s activities with articles of a more substantial literary nature. Our podcast Tiny In All That Air has featured some of the world’s leading scholars on Larkin and his contemporaries, such as Professor James Booth and Professor Zachary Leader, but also hosts Larkin chat with writers and artists, PLS committee members, honorary vice presidents and, of course, the members themselves. Our new YouTube channel provides a wealth of recordings, historic and new. Our social media presence on X and Instagram has thousands of followers. We are always looking for new and creative ways to promote knowledge and understanding of Philip Larkin and to get as many people as possible involved from Hull to all around the world. You too can become a member!

WHAT ARE OUR AIMS?
  • To promote the public knowledge and appreciation of the works of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) and his literary contemporaries
  • To bring together all those who admire Larkin’s work as poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian
  • To bring about publications on all things Larkinesque
WHAT DO WE DO?
  • Online and in person events such as conferences, readings, and talks about all aspects of Larkin’s life
  • Online members social events
  • About Larkin Journal, published twice a year in April and October
  • A regular e-newsletter
  • A member of the Alliance of Literary Societies
  • Twitter, YouTube and Instagram channels
  • A regular podcast, Tiny in All that Air.
RECENT NEWS
A VERY SPECIAL PODCAST
We have developed a bit of a tradition of recording readings of Larkin’s poems for the podcast- obviously we always encourage our podcast guests to read their favourite Larkin poems-
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FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Saturday 11th October 10.00 am Drafting A World: A Poetry Writing Workshop Inspired By Philip Larkin’s Hull Come join us at Artlink Hull for the second poetry writing workshop ,
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THE PHILIP LARKIN SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
In addition to our twice yearly journal About Larkin, the Society publishes a regular newsletter dedicated to all things Larkin. Members and those signed up via the website receive a copy via
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POEM REVIEW

The Whitsun Weddings

January 2011 Nomination: The Whitsun Weddings [18 October 1958. From The Whitsun Weddings] The line ‘we ran behind the backs of houses, crossed a street of blinding windscreens’ has long fascinated me. I was born in Hull, and made the journey from Paragon Station to Kings Cross many times as a child (much later than Larkin did). When you leave Paragon, there are only two level crossings before the river’s level drifting breadth begins. One of those streets, Hawthorn Avenue (the other is St Georges Rd) was where my mother was born, my grandmother lived until her death in 1981 and my brother and I regularly played as children. On our trips to the capital, my father would always point out when we crossed ‘grandma’s street’. I know that Larkin doesn’t specify which street he crosses in the poem, but I always like to think that one of those blinding windscreens, back in
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Absences

February 2010 Nomination: Absences [28 November 1950. From The Less Deceived] Larkin thought of the last line as sounding ‘like a slightly unconvincing translation from a French symbolist’ – and surprisingly went on to say that he wished he could write like this more often. Coming from a background of research into French poetry, I have naturally been intrigued by this confessional analysis. And all the more so since Larkin’s wish wasn’t a casual comment – there is plenty of evidence that, of all his poems, ‘Absences’ held a special place in his eyes. When asked to choose a poem that represented his work, he submitted ‘Absences’ to an anthology called Poet’s Choice in 1962. Elsewhere in his selected letters, he writes ‘I have…special affection for ABSENCES’ and in his famous interview with John Haffenden he again mentions ‘Absences’ as a candidate for his most typical poem. So I could hazard a guess
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The School in August

August 2002 Nomination: The School in August [1943 ? From Collected Poems (1988)] This lovely, simple poem captures so well the solitude, and unanswered questions of an empty school in the summer holidays. And the relentless latent march of time. The poem took me back to my schooldays in Southsea, happy swimming groups and a young schoolboy now turned grey. Paul Beaumont
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The Building

March 2012 Nomination: The Building [9 February 1972. From High Windows] Having suffered a minor stroke at the beginning of the month, I spent the first two weeks of December 2011 in Hull Royal Infirmary. This was my first stay as an in-patient in any hospital for over 50 years. I was occasionally shuttled by porters from the stroke ward to various other departments in order to undergo scans. It was hardly surprising, as I was being manoeuvred through the corridors of the hospital on those short journeys, to find words from Larkin’s ‘The Building’ coming to mind. Specifically: For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those, And more rooms yet, each one further off And harder to return from; Consequently, ‘The Building’ was the first poem I re-read when I returned home, and one of the first I turned to in the Commentaries section when I took delivery of the recently published Philip
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The little lives of earth and form

March 2001 Nomination: The little lives of earth and form [6 May 1977. From Collected Poems (1988)] For its tenderness and lyricism. Tom Courtenay
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Wants

December 2010 Nomination: Wants [1 June 1950. From The Less Deceived] This is the poem that Larkin intones at the end of the Monitor film made with Betjeman in 1964. Once you’ve listened to him reading it, it’s impossible to hear it in any other voice. As he delivers the lines, the camera pulls back and he walks away, as if illustrating the very “wish to be alone” that is the poem’s subject. It is perhaps consciously contradictory (as with so many things about Larkin) that one of the few times he allows film cameras into his life concludes with an expression of wanting to be alone. As an articulation of the forlorn, it is nonetheless a remarkably engaging poem. Interestingly this drive towards isolation is inextricable in the film from images of the city – the mist rising from the canal along which he retreats has more than a Stygian whiff of ‘oblivion’ about
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Water

June 2008 Nomination: Water [6 April 1954. From The Whitsun Weddings] Philip Larkin wrote the unlike poems ‘Skin’ and ‘Water’ on two consecutive days in 1954: the first on 5 April, the second on the 6th. They are so dissimilar they are almost antithetical: one day’s cheerless prognosis followed, without warning, by the next’s up-lifting vision. ‘Skin’ regrets the failure to participate in a carnally ‘brash festivity’, while ‘Water’ looks forward to the possibility of a ‘liturgy’, or rite, that has elements of the Eucharist, but none of the bodily associations – ‘This is my body, this is my blood’ – that the Christian sacrament carries with it. ‘Skin’ has a rhyme-scheme, more palpable in the first stanza than in the third, where the final, very loose connection of ‘changes’ with ‘such as’ lends expression to the bathos that is the poem’s theme; ‘Water’, doing without rhyme, takes the reader to mystical heights
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Essential Beauty

Nomination: Essential Beauty [26 June 1962. From The Whitsun Weddings] Although “Granny Graveclothes’ Tea” must surely be an invention, no doubt there are scholars of Fifties and Sixties advertising who could identify the source of Larkin’s images in this underdiscussed poem. It is a fine example of how Larkin could pictorialise thought while “thinking in verse”. In this case he plays off the perfections of idealised products with the realities of disappointment and death. Part of the final image, the smoker, must be “the lonely man” from one of ITV’s early ads, and which was very famous in its time, iconic in fact, and now preserved for ever in a higher form of art. In a radio programme edited by George MacBeth, Ted Hughes said “Philip Larkin’s poetry is very sad, and the sadder it is the better I like it.” I quote from memory. I was in the studio and was astonished
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Continuing to Live

March 2002 Nomination: Continuing to Live [24 April 1954. From A Keepsake for the New Library] I extracted this poem from Philip under duress for the Keepsake published at the opening of the new library at the School of Oriental & African Studies, where I was then Librarian. I also managed to persuade W H Auden, Edward Brathwaite, Omar Pound, Nathaniel Tarn and Thom Blackburn to contribute original poems for this pamphlet which was designed by Frances Duncan and published for me by John Duncan, then Managing Director of Mansell. So Philip was in good company, and the poem itself I always think is as good as anything else he wrote at the time of The Less Deceived. Barry Cambray Bloomfield
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Broadcast

July 2002 Nomination: Broadcast [6 November 1961. From The Whitsun Weddings] This poem was first published in The Listener in January 1962. On my copy Philip wrote: ‘To Maeve who wd. sooner listen to music than listen to me’ and drew this sketch of himself enveloped in gloom beside his wireless, and of me, rapt in the more formal atmosphere of the concert hall. One Sunday afternoon the previous November, the BBC Simphony Orchestra gave a concert in the City Hall, Hull which was simultaneously broadcast on the radio. Knowing I was at the live performance, Philip listened to it at home. The following day he handed me a typescript of the poem, initially called ‘Broadcast Concert’, but later shortened to ‘Broadcast’. Elated and deeply moved, I was amused by the description of my shoes which had been the object of a shared, private joke that autumn. Elegant, with stiletto heels and pointed toes, popularly
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Aubade

May 2006 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977. The Times Literary Supplement 23 December 1977] ‘Aubade’ was published in the Times Literary Supplement in December, 1977. Regarded as his last great poem, it is constantly referenced and deeply revered: for many, an unnervingly unambiguous work of art. The opening line, which sets the stall for the whole piece, must surely have satisfied the expectations of most Larkin enthusiasts at the time: I work all day, and get half drunk at night Straight away we know that this is going to be an honest, intensely personal piece of work. It’s only after several readings, however, that it becomes clear how beautifully written it is; how all rules of rhyme and meter are, forgive me, religiously adhered to and yet, read aloud, it sounds like free form. Constant reference to it is easy. Not unusually for Larkin, there are no lines wasted here. Death pervades his masterpiece just as
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Sinking like sediment through the day

March 2008 Nomination: Sinking like sediment through the day [13 May 1949. From Collected Poems (1988)] May 1949, the month this poem was written, found Larkin at an emotional low ebb. That spring, his relationship with Ruth Bowman had come to an end, the success of his two novels was behind him and not to be repeated, and his collection In the Grip of Light had been rejected by every publisher he had approached. Poems that his slough of depression did yield that March, April and May reveal a disillusioned, self-pitying persona apparently convinced that he has nothing to live for, that failure beckons. ‘Neurotics’ (‘You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery’); ‘I am washed upon a rock’ (‘My heart is ticking like the sun: /A lonely cloud drifts in the sky. /I dread its indecision. /If once it blocks the light, I die’); and ‘To Failure’ (‘You have been here some time’) – none of
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Coming

January 2001 Nomination: Coming [25 February 1950. From XX Poems and The Less Deceived] I have chosen ‘Coming’ as January’s Poem of the Month – and the first in what promises to be a long series – primarily because it was the first of Larkin’s poems that I ever came across. I was introduced to it by my then English master (Commander Cummings !) at school in the late 1960s. The images which struck me most were the ‘serene/ Foreheads of houses’ and the song of the thrush ‘Astonishing the brickwork’. Now, I like the lack of poetical form and metre (as much as I admire the strict formal regularity of such later poems as ‘Here’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’); the natural syntax, and the ease with which the poem can be read and understood; and its unfolding optimism. The poetical devices are all (subtly) linguistic: the repetition of the letter ‘L’ in the first
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Home is so Sad

June 2003 Nomination: Home is so Sad [31 December 1958. From The Whitsun Weddings] I nominated this poem as it shows how Larkin saw existence as being empty. How the concept of being was to please others, it tries to draw back the occupants by remaining unchanged. Larkin shows the fears people have about change (something he to was sceptical about) especially modernisation. He makes the poem personal, as if we are already aware of what is contained in the house – the last line especially. ‘ That Vase’. The poem illustrates how Larkin could often personify the Home into the grief of non-existence. Something we can all relate to. James Blythe
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Talking in Bed

March 2003 Nomination: Talking in Bed [10 August 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] I chose ‘Talking in Bed’ because it is at once so simple and so profoundly philosophical, obviously situated in the context of two humans, fighting against their own alienation and against a hostile environment, but extending to some eternal human dilemmas. The projection of how difficult it can be to tell the truth and keep your friends too is one of the finest achievements of the poem. Bahaa-Eddin Mazid
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Cut Grass

June 2005 Nomination: Cut Grass [3 June 1971. From High Windows] This is sometimes thought as in some ways a companion piece to ‘The Trees’, Poem of the Month for May 2005 and another tying Larkin elegiacally to an England somewhere in the middle of the last century. But ‘The Trees’ is a discussion and a reflection on mortality, the possibility for change, the impermananence of life, and the possibility of renewal, another use of the image of a tree as a life force (as in ‘Love Songs in Age’). A bundle of tightly compressed metaphors. ‘Cut Grass’, on the other hand is almost pure imagery. The poet is completely invisible. There is no sense of an ‘I’ – there is a sense of an eye – the image falling as instant, like the image on a camera (with which Larkin was expert) preserving one moment, then and in England, now and in
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Money

October 2012 Nomination: Money [19 February 1973. From High Windows] “Money makes the world go round”, so they say. It seems to me that whenever I turn the radio on ‘its’ usually talks about financial markets, the value of the pound, the economy and cutting costs by reduction of the labour force Visiting Larkin’s poem ‘Money’ certainly makes you think. If you’ve got it — spend it some will say, or do you keep it for a rainy day? Clearly money does have something to do with life. The sadness is either not having enough, or if you have, not knowing what to do with it! Michael Wilson
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Bridge for the Living

June 2014 Nomination: Bridge for the Living [December 1975. Poetry Book Society Supplement, (Christmas 1981)] In Chapter 7 of his most recent monograph, Radical Larkin: Seven Types of Technical Mastery, John Osborne challenges James Booth’s claim that Larkin: ‘waits for the right time to use a word, will not use it until that time comes, and then, if at all possible, never uses it again.’ Osborne goes on to write of ‘the innumerable small-scale rehearsals of diction, phrasing and cadence scattered throughout the oeuvre‘ that constitute the radical self-citation evident in Larkin’s late masterpiece ‘Aubade’. Such self-citation, specifically in ‘Aubade’, could be viewed as symbolising a life review flashing by in response to the prospect of imminent death and extinction: the near-death experience of the poem itself. An examination of ‘Bridge for the Living’ (written just two years before ‘Aubade’) reveals a similar density of self-citation the symbolism of which might be interpreted as a
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Days

July 2011 Nomination: Days [3 August 1953. From The Whitsun Weddings] As Director of the Philip Larkin Centre I am always pleased to discover new writing that spins out from an appreciation of a Larkin poem, some call and response from across the decades. I was struck to find David Nicholls’ moving and best-selling novel One Day has the entire ‘Days’ as its epigraph. For me it is a wilfully cheerful poem. It sings of a simple take on life we all can share, and then takes a rueful look at the professionals, our lawyers and doctors sweeping on to the scene in their long coats to add complexity and so confuse us. The ‘Ah’ is such a touching note, a sigh from a poet looking out from that simplicity of the first verse and smiling as he gives us an image of professionals in the fields. The poem is raised above the sentimental, the
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Mr Bleaney

July 2001 Nomination: Mr Bleaney [May 1955. From The Whitsun Weddings] I am currently studying Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings as part of my A-Level English Literature course, I have become rather attached to “Mr. Bleaney”, the mystery and ambience which surrounds this character fascinates me, how such a grey and apathetic life can have such an affect on a household, and possess an almost immortal quality as his presence is still felt by the next tenant. Lydia Williams
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