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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
David Remfrey ‘A Homecoming’
Beverley Art Gallery’s latest exhibition contains more than a nod towards Philip Larkin. Curated by Dr Geradine Mulcahy-Parker, the exhibition offers a fascinating retrospective of Remfrey’s work, tracking his artistic
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Almost Instinct Almost True
The Old Red Lion Theatre, London  8th- 12th April 2025 This critically acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe transfer is the poignant darkly comic story of poet Philip Larkin’s lover Monica, and her
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Forthcoming events
  25 April Remembering Anthony Thwaite, St James Church, Sussex Gardens, London, 6.00 PM To marks the publication of At the Garden’s Dark Edge, an anthology of Anthony Thwaite’s poems, a
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POEM REVIEW

This Be The Verse

September 2002 Nomination: This Be The Verse [April 1971. From High Windows] For millions, this terribly British poem encapsulates both the agony of parenthood and our rage at our parents for having, inevitably, deranged us at times. It cleverly leaves open the question of whether our parents filled us with the faults they had (and added some extra just for you) through their negligent care or by passing on dud genes. The most memorable lines, ‘man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf’, have a resonance equal to any of the greatest poetry, yet Larkin’s crisp, dark humour throughout allows us to be in on a joke, avoiding American earnestness and providing British authenticity. Oliver James
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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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The School in August

January 2006 Nomination: The School in August [1943 From Collected Poems (1988)] The School in August is, I think, the best of Larkin’s early poems, and the least typical. This is the kind of poetry he was desperately trying not to write in his Auden-esque youth: flowery, sing-song, literary. And it has all the surprising charm of a teenager who forgets to be sullen for a moment and lets his natural temperament get through. ‘Make it new’, said Ezra Pound, and his advice has been so taken to heart by poets that even orthodoxy seems too weak a word for it. Poetry should above all be original; the hackeneyed and the threadbare are the supreme foes of art. Turn away from daffodils and churchyards, and disover the poetry lurking in the computer screen and the inner city. And don’t use words like soul or heart or joy; they’re weak from over-work. But what if
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Money

December 2008 Nomination: Money [19 February 1973. From High Windows] ‘Money’ has never been chosen so far. Perhaps it takes an age of inflation to fully appreciate a poem written in the aftermath of the oil shock in 1973. Now that governments are frantically trying to ‘boost consumer spending’ and that the wisdom of ‘banking your screw’ (i.e. salary) has been questioned by the credit crunch, some of Larkin’s lines are once again eerily topical. Beyond those circumstances, however, ‘Money’ remains to me a quintessential Larkin poem. The first three stanzas accumulate disenchanted commonplaces and crass colloquialisms in the same way that a miser might hoard up increasingly worthless banknotes. The final stanza, then, exchanges the end-stopped trivialities of the preceding stanzas for an almost visionary mode. The full stop after ‘singing’ forces us to stop in mid-line and ponder the comparison of money to tempting sirens. The enjambments then take us through
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The Building

February 2006 Nomination: The Building [9 February 1972. From High Windows] Looking down the list of previously chosen ‘Poems of the Month’ it was no surprise to find ‘The Building’ wasn’t there. Of all Larkin’s major poems it seems to get mentioned the least (someone will immediately notify me of the six articles, three books and one international conference that have been devoted exclusively to ‘The Building’ in the last month). Nevertheless, there is a natural reluctance to enthuse about it; I can’t see it being anthologised in ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poems’, can you? I’m reminded of Larkin’s ironic exclamation: ‘The Oxford Book of Death! How marvellous!’ in a review of the same. A poem about dying in hospital is always going to have its work cut out competing for our affections with, say, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, that monument to ‘untruth’. Even amongst Larkin fans I detect a certain squeamishness. But then, what
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The Dance

August 2010 Nomination: The Dance [30 June 1963–12 May 1964. From Collected Poems (1988)] On 15 February 2010, I received an email from Andy Newlove, the owner of Fairview Studios in Willerby. It consisted of two short sentences, containing just 25 words. The second sentence said simply: Matt Edible thinks he’s got his track down to 12 mins! Matt Edible is the singer and songwriter with The Holy Orders. A month earlier, I’d asked Matt if he would contribute a song to all night north, an album of twelve new songs using poems by Philip Larkin as lyrics. Matt had responded by saying he would love to be part of the project and that he was considering using ‘The Dance’: I really like the unfinished poem ‘The Dance’ but it is rather lengthy and I’m not sure that if I attempted to wr After receiving Andy Newlove’s email, I said to my wife, Julie: “Well, that’ll be the
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The Trees

May 2005 Nomination: The Trees [2 June 1967. From High Windows] I love ‘The Trees’ because of the optimistic note on which it ends – optimism being, for me, a quality that is often overlooked in Larkin’s verse. The notion of starting “afresh, afresh, afresh” each year is one that I find sustaining. As in a lot of his work, there is a strong notion of continuity – things persisting whilst life moves around them. Think of “the earl and countess” lying “in stone” whilst around them “the endless altered people came” in ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and I think you have something similar to the “rings of grain” that mark the passing years for the trees, which otherwise would seem not to change or grow old at all. Life moving in cycles is a familiar theme in Larkin (Dockery’s son has followed him to Oxford), and it is present in spades here. We
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The Trees

May 2005 Nomination: The Trees [2 June 1967. From High Windows] I would like to nominate ‘The Trees’ for its mastery of versification and the nicely judged lingusitic modulation – from the mainly monosyyllabic simplicity of the first two quatrains to the splendid richness of the final stanza – with that inspired repetition of ‘afresh’. Vernon Scannell
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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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Love, we must part now

February 2013 Nomination: Love, we must part now [1943-44. From The North Ship] If I look for unlikely favourites I suppose I’d go for The North Ship simply because they are so memorable as I discussed each one with him. Of course they’re not very good, often derivative etc. etc. but for me they have something which has nothing to do with their intrinsic literary value or with any perceptive appreciation on my part. I’d choose ‘Love, we must part now’. Ruth Siverns
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Absences

April 2002 Nomination: Absences [28 November 1950. From The Less Deceived] Larkin claimed a special affection for ‘Absences’, perhaps because he knew that in matter and manner it works in ways which might take his readers, and himself, slightly by surprise: “I fancy it sounds like a different, better poet than myself,” he wrote of it. ‘Absences’ was one of the poems from The Less Deceived that we O level schoolboys of the early 1970s didn’t much bother with; not when there were so many other poems which seeemed to say so much more. Now, the poem’s not-saying, the absorption in emptiness, the thrill of self-forgetting seem more fundamental to Larkin’s imagination as a kind of half-submerged, almost-secret longing. Andrew Swarbrick
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Sunny Prestatyn

April 2005 Nomination: Sunny Prestatyn [October 1962? From The Whitsun Weddings] Walking through the suburbs of the city and finding oneself strangely drawn to the graffiti on walls, play-parks and posters, one couldn’t help but be reminded of ‘Sunny Prestatyn’. A poem that at once shows the comic yet callous defacement of advertisement posters whilst carefully crafting the unknown beauty which lies within everything (but is somehow destroyed and squandered by everyday existence), it is a remarkably accomplished piece, even from a poet as capable as Larkin. As with much of Larkin’s poetry the metre and rhyme scheme is tightly controlled, in such a way that allows the poem to flow from images of the ‘expand[ing]’ and ‘spread[ing]’ scene which swells from the laughing girl’s thighs and breasts, into the sudden ‘scor[ing]’ and ‘scrawls’ of the sabotaging, anonymous youngsters. Despite its versatility the poem never sounds disjointed, and manages to retain a completeness
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The Mower

March 2011 Nomination: The Mower [12 June 1979. From Collected Poems 1988] p>I would like to nominate ‘The Mower’, partly because I have an unaccountable interest in old mowers, partly because of the very precise date of its inspiration (10/06/79), but mostly (98%) because of ‘Next morning I got up and it did not’, and the killer final lines. Doubtless it’s a minority view, but ‘The Mower’ marks the summit of Larkin’s work for me. Combined with the references to the poem’s genesis in various letters, and Monica Jones’s testimony that ‘he came in howling…’, it indicates to me the hidden heart of the man. ‘What will survive’ of him is that ‘we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.’ John Whitbourn
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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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Love

June 2011 Nomination: Love [7 December 1962. From Collected Poems 1988] In 1981 my father died very suddenly and my mother came to stay with me for a few days later in the year. Whist she was in my partner, John Osborne’s, flat on Eldon Grove she began to read High Windows: one of the volumes of Larkin’s poetry on John‘s bookshelves. She told us how much she had enjoyed them but she couldn’t be prevailed upon to take the book home with her and read it at her leisure. At the time I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Hull and working on my dissertation on Thomas Hardy’s women characters. I was based in a room on Salmon Grove, one of a number of postgraduate study rooms in the houses there. Thinking about my mother I suddenly had the idea of buying a copy of High Windows and sending it to Philip Larkin, then
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And now the leaves suddenly lose strength

June 2012 Nomination: And now the leaves suddenly lose strength [3 November 1961. From Collected Poems (1988)] This is an uncollected poem written in 1961. It is a changing of the seasons poems but it shows, perhaps too clearly for Larkin to want to publish it in his lifetime, the influences of Hardy and Auden. The word “rubricate” in line four makes me feel slightly hysterical but I love all the “l” alliteration in the first four lines that somehow seem to imitate in sound the leaching out of the season’s energy. Then a great burst of movement comes with the “rain-bearing night winds” and we’ve moved from the country into the town. The “vague broomed men” prefigure the characters in ‘Toads Revisited’ written a year later. What really excites me though is the handling of the long sentence that is the second stanza and which shows in one great rhetorical sweep men through
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The Explosion

May 2010 Nomination: The Explosion [5 January 1970. From High Windows] Speeding up to my sixth decade, months away now, alas not years, I find Larkin’s observations on his transit through life are even more poignant (‘The Winter Palace’, ‘Days’, ‘I have started to say’, ‘Aubade’). I also married on 24th May 1969 (a ‘Whitsun Wedding’) my bride 18 and I at 17, we celebrated our 40th anniversary in May 2009. However, being the Son and Grandson of a Yorkshire miner, the one Larkin poem that provokes clear recall and all the emotions that that act evokes is ‘The Explosion’ (1970). The childhood that helped build this man was spent in the shadows of those slagheaps, sharing the polluted air, muck, laughter and tragedy of a close knit mining community. Graham Ibbeson
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Church Going

March 2006 Nomination: Church Going [28 July 1954. From The Less Deceived] ‘Church Going’, from Larkin’s 1955 collection The Less Deceived, stands out as a masterpiece of rhetoric, introducing a facility with register that launched a thousand imitations. Many readers are encouraged to read ‘Church Going’ as an example of Larkin’s ambivalent relationship with the spiritual. There is little doubt that the everyman persona-narrator who takes us on this by turns solemn and irreverent guided tour experiences both a sense of futility and mystique in equal measure. An overload of sensory impression confronts our narrator upon his arrival, inspiring both bewilderment and that particular quality of ‘hunger’ for understanding he imagines will continue to draw men in. Objects here are represented as finite in their quality and, as such, they possess bathos and pathos in equal measure in this spiritual context. And yet, similarly, the environment gives rise to wonder, a sense of timelessness
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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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Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album

February 2005 Nomination: Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album [18 September 1953. From The Less Deceived] Since Poem of the Month has been going for so long now it is no surprise that most of the ‘best’ and best-known pieces have been chosen but it does come as some surprise that ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’ isn’t listed here yet. It achieves some typically Larkin balances between, for example, the respectable diction, its conscious imitation of the poetry of a previous century in its title and the not-so-faintly suggested pornographic intentions of the poet. It describes a private shame honestly admitted. It regrets the poet’s ‘exclusion’ from the young lady’s subsequent future while celebrating the freedom it allows to enjoy the captured moment; it praises the honesty and accuracy of the camera while enjoying the artificial nature of each ‘pose’ and the ‘fraud’ of the smiles. Larkin’s habitual understatement contrasts
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