WELCOME TO

THE PHILIP LARKIN SOCIETY

August 2001 Nomination: The Whitsun Weddings [18 October 1958. From The Whitsun Weddings] This is one of the three or four really spacious, almost symphonic Larkin poems, alongside ‘Church Going’, ‘The Building’, and ‘Aubade’. One of the reasons why I have a special affection for it is that I was responsible for giving it its first public airing. I was at the time a BBC radio producer, in March 1959, and I had written to Larkin (whom I first met in July 1958) asking whether he had a new unpublished poem I could use in a Third Programme ‘New Poetry’ broadcast. Larkin sent ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, and on 17 March 1959 followed it with a letter (see Selected Letters) suggesting how he would like it read. The ‘New Poetry’ containing the poem was first broadcast on 5 April. It then appeared in the June 1959 issue of Encounter. Anthony Thwaite

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

October 2013 Nomination: Deceptions [20 February 1950. From The Less Deceived] It is with a degree of uneasiness that one nominates ‘Deceptions’ as a ‘favourite poem’. This is, after all, a work which is about an act of sexual violence. And yet, again and again, I return to it, its value and its impact never diminishing. It is a truly remarkable work. ‘The more sensitive you are to suffering the nicer person you are and the more accurate notion of life you have’, Larkin said in an interview with John Haffenden. Morally simplistic as his language may sound there – the word ‘nicer’ sits a little languidly – the idea of becoming attuned to suffering in order to become a better, more empathetic and understanding person, is a powerful one. This is one of the things literature can ‘do’. For me, Larkin’s work can be read as a lifelong attempt to get inside

August 2005 Nomination: The Card Players [6 May 1970. From High Windows] The aspect of ‘The Card-Players’ that I find most beguiling is its celebration of raw, earthy and unfettered maleness. It’s is a poem about men behaving badly that positively revels in its freedom from “feminine” (speaking stereotypically) notions of decorum, propriety and etiquette. These normal constraints don’t have to be observed because there are no women around to insist upon them. The “boys” can simply get pissed, gamble, smoke, fart, piss out the door and do all the other things that chaps like to do when the “ladies” aren’t around to place checks on their behaviour. Jan, Dirk and the others aren’t the only male transgressors here. Outside of the poem stands Larkin, presumably delighting in the freedom that his secure poetic reputation gives him to introduce into English literature such unsavoury subject matter and bar-room vocabulary: the famous “four-letter Larkin”

April 2001 Nomination: High Windows [12 February 1967. From High Windows] Favourite poems: very difficult. I got 10 on a first run through the Collected Poem. My final 3 are humdrum and obvious except the last [‘High Windows’]. ‘High Windows’ … seems to me to sound new depths. Anecdotes: My wife Mary saw him [Larkin] at the bus stop waiting for a bus into town. Said he was going to Thornton Varley’s [a Hull city centre department store] for bread. Surprised when he was told he could get it quite near where he lived. Asked us to supper when it was announced that we were going to the States for a year. If we got near New York would I go to the shop of someone called, I think, Sam Goody, the best seller of jazz records on earth. Gave me a list. On a trip to New York I left the family looking

August 2003 Nomination: Going, Going [25 January 1972. From High Windows] ‘Going, Going’, being a government-commissioned poem originally titled ‘Prologue’, is seldom considered by literary experts to rank amongst Larkin’s finest work. This may be, but the poem puts over a hard-hitting environmental message and lines from it are frequently in the media, often in the context of some campaign currently raging. Larkin wrote the poem in 1972 at the same time as he was composing the even bleaker ‘The Building’, and the two could be read together to get some idea of the sense of finality he wished to convey to his readers. You wouldn’t think that a simple request for a poem to preface an HMSO report on the human habitat called ‘How Do You Want To Live?’ would create problems – but it did. The commissioning committee deliberately deleted Larkin’s lines about ‘spectacled grins’, ‘takeover bids’ and ‘Grey area grants’,

December 2002 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977. The Times Literary Supplement 23 December 1977] It’s sometimes said that Larkin ‘dried up’ after High Windows and wrote nothing worth preserving thereafter. But there were three or four outstanding poems between its publication in 1975 and his death 10 years later: ‘The Mower’, ‘Love Again’, ‘The Life With a Hole in It’ and (best of all) ‘Aubade’. The subject of ‘Aubade’ is death, which he’d visited many times before. But this is a late poem, with neither the controlling symbolism of ‘Next, Please’ nor the brutal distancing of ‘The Old Fools’. Here he faces death head-on, with naked dread and almost shaming self-pity. With a stab at Keats, who found the prospect of it ‘easeful’, Larkin calls death ‘unresting’ and itemises its horrors. His morbidity sounds almost Victorian in places. But that doesn’t stop him being Shavianly quotable (religion is defined as ‘that vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to

November 2007 Nomination: Could wish to lose hands [before September 1940. From Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenilia] Many reviewers of Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenil (Ed. A T Tolley, Faber, 2005) enormously enjoyed noting the obvious – that the young writer had not yet attained the great distinctive voice of later years. Rather than loftily looking back and down at these poems over the heads of their potent, weighty successors, it is more rewarding to read them as if they were fresh-made by a new poet-on-the-block, a poet decidedly but unpredictably promising. Imitations there are, of course, but all sorts of graces, surprises and suggestions of originality. My choice for Poem of the Month, ‘Could wish to lose hands’, has a startling, jazzy jolt to its rhythms, register and imagery. The energetic wish to conduct creative lightning, contrasted with the desire for river-like absorption into nature, is expressed in a Blakean image rendered

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

October 2007 Nomination: As Bad as a Mile [9 February 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] When ‘As Bad as a Mile’ was first published in the University of Buffalo’s Audit magazine in February 1960, it was originally titled ‘As Good as a Mile’. On the face of it, such a minor editorial change might not seem worthy of mention, but where poetry is concerned it’s also worth bearing in mind that meaning hinges carefully on each and every word. As a result, it’s my inkling that Larkin’s retrospective switch between the classic binary oppositions of the Judeo-Christian moral dichotomy holds, in many respects, the key to the fullest and most interesting reading of the poem. ‘As Bad as a Mile’ is a poem about failure. It takes, as is typical of Larkin, a mundane and everyday act of chance and invests within it an existential and revelatory significance. Hence, when the apple core is flipped

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

May 2001 Nomination: An Arundel Tomb [20 February 1956] One of the lasting bequests left perhaps unwittingly by Philip Larkin can be described as a ‘paper chase.’ Not the usual kind: but scattered all over the country are places where Larkin trod, objects which moved him and people whose lives he enriched. The Larkin reader can go to these places and experience for himself what inspired the poet. Some seven years ago I was intrigued by ‘An Arundel Tomb.’ I had, alongside the poem, the Longman Critical Essays in which John Saunders takes a look at beauty and truth in three poems from The Whitsun Weddings. There was a footnote referring the reader to an Otter Memorial Paper entitled ‘An Arundel Tomb’, by Dr. Paul Foster of West Sussex Institute of Higher Education. Thus began an interesting (for me) correspondence with Dr. Foster. I asked whether the final line of the poem, ‘What

January 2013 Nomination: The Explosion [5 January 1970. From High Windows (1970)] Larkin is one of the masters of the English Language and I’m an unqualified reader incapable of judging him on technique and style. I only know I like very much the way he writes. As to what he writes, I enjoy his sceptical, sidelong, look at life; I enjoy how the sort of jagged acidity of self expression at times seems bordering on self distaste; he seems to find a perverse delight in this self distaste. But I love the lyrical terseness that sometimes comes out of him almost as though against his will, as it does in ‘The Trees’, ‘Cut Grass’ (which I particularly love), or ‘At Grass’. It is as though his delight at what he sees overcomes any of his more usual tendencies to make a side-swipe. In ‘The Explosion’, as far as I know, Larkin is detached from

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

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

April 2008 Nomination: I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land [1943. From The North Ship] I used to be inclined to take Philip Larkin’s remark that his rhymes more or less find themselves as a variety of intimidation, until I read his earliest poems. Then I realized that what he’s talking about is mastery, and that he achieved it through intense practice early on. You can form some idea of how intense this practice was by checking the dates of the juvenilia (handily supplied in the Collected Poems, 1988). From the awkward versifier of sixteen (clever phrasemonger, though: the sky in ‘Winter Nocturne’ is hard as granite and fixed as fate’), to the twenty-year-old who writes ‘I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land’: it’s enough to make you wish you hadn’t wasted your own teenage years memorizing sports trivia. What’s remarkable about this poem as juvenilia is that the only thing that

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

May 2002 Nomination: The Mower [12 June 1979. From Collected Poems (1988)] I remember too well Philip telling me of the death of the hedgehog: it was in his office the following morning with tears streaming down his face. The resultant poem ends with a message for everyone. Betty Mackereth

May 2012 Nomination: At Grass [3 January 1950. From The Less Deceived (1955)] This poem reminds me forcibly of Philip’s strong attachment to the RSPCA and his utter loathing of cruelty to animals, reflected in his writing and his will and final legacy. Barry Cambray Bloomfield

October 2001 Nomination: The Old Fools [12 January 1973. From High Windows] I can at present think of no poem which moves me so much as “The Old Fools”, though it is undeniably uncomfortable. I was introduced to Larkin’s poetry, as an undergraduate at UEA, by A.E.Dyson. The first poem we studied was “Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album” and the effect was as of a powerful and immediate drug; this was what I had been looking for. Thirty six years later I am still under the spell of this most immaculate user of the English language. His words have informed and formulated much of my adult life. He would, I suspect, have found this wryly amusing. Tony Hulme