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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

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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Going, Going

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’,
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Wedding-Wind

December 2001 Nomination: Wedding-Wind [26 September 1946. From XX Poems and The Less Deceived] I have always been a keen reader (and occasional writer) of poetry. I first came across Larkin when studying for English A level many years ago. Subsequently I maintained an interest, and more recently bought the collected poems, where I first read ‘Wedding Wind’. I like this poem because it is unusually joyful for Larkin, particularly the closing lines – ‘these new delighted lakes…’. I hope I may have the opportunity to read this at at least one of my three daughters’ weddings eventually. I was recently reminded of this poem by Madonna’s ‘Don’t Tell Me’, which has the lines: Tell the bed not to lay Like the open mouth of a grave, yeah Not to stare up at me Like a calf down on its knees Not the same meaning at all, but somehow the same images, and it drew me
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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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Faith Healing

November 2005 Nomination: Faith Healing [10 May 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] “Moustached in flowered frocks they shake” is surely a line which perfectly describes feminine limitations. This image of “shaking” “flowered frocks” whose femininity is mocked by their “moustache” demonstrates Larkin’s humourous observation perfectly. Most women, even when not “moustached”, cannot help but sympathise with that “immense slackening ache” experienced when a need is not recognised or the answer cannot be found to that relentless question. Beth Fletcher
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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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Tops

February 2002 Nomination: Tops [24 October 1953. From Collected Poems (1988)] This poem was written in 1953, but did not appear in any of the major collections, and deserves to be better known. In my opinion it is an amazing poem, in which Philip shows his skill at relating an insignificant and commonplace occurrence to a universal theme. The barely perceptible running-down of the top presages the first signs of ageing and death, of which Philip had felt such terror since he was a very young man. ‘What most appals Is that tiny first shiver..’ How absolutely and incontrovertibly true! Winifred Dawson
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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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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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MCMXIV

February 2014 Nomination: MCMXIV [17 May 1960. The Whitsun Weddings] I’d like to nominate and comment on ‘MCMXIV’. When Larkin was deciding the title for this wonderfully soft-focus masterpiece of understatement, he settled on MCMXIV not only to stay true to the carving on the memorial, but also because he considered 1914 in Arabic numerals would have too great an emotional impact on readers for anything he might write. How wrong, at least for this reader, for whom the use of historical Roman numerals on a 20th century cenotaph suggests a kind of hypocrisy, saying we are sorry about these events, but prefer to think of them happening before our time: “Not on our watch, Matey”. But they did, and still do happen in our time. In 1960 when this poem was being written, Larkin would have been well aware of further worldwide atrocities, including the indiscriminate bombing of Coventry where he had lived as
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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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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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This Be The Verse

July 2006 Nomination: This Be The Verse [April ? 1971. From High Windows] For me, ‘This Be The Verse’, with its tort timing and unambiguous accessibility, epitomizes all that poetry should be. Here, Larkin is almost anarchic in his deliberately crude choice of form. In my humble opinion Larkin utilizes the word ‘fuck’ with far more aplomb than any other writer has to date. This mostly monosyllabic and rigorously reasoned rant berates convention and engages the reader. You either agree wholly with Larkin or disagree, either way the last stanza with its throw-away ending is magnificently defiant. What is all the more remarkable is that Larkin was playing down the highbrow, utilizing a vulgar tone of phrase that reverberates the acidic tone of the poem. In High Windows Larkin was on the cusp of taking poetry to a new stratosphere of accessibility, in ‘This Be The Verse’ he soared beyond that stratosphere for just one
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Love Again

April 2013 Nomination: Love Again [20 September 1979. From The Complete Poems (2012)] Reviewing Anthony Thwaite’s 1988 edition of Larkin’s Collected Poems, the late, great poet and critic Ian Hamilton grouped ‘Love Again’ with a handful of previously unpublished poems he termed ‘desperately miserable, indeed inconsolable.’ It’s hard to disagree. Even though ‘Love Again’ has its faults — what Hamilton was apt to call ‘wonky’ moments as poetry — its searing power makes such blemishes seem negligible. And while some critics resist a purely autobiographical reading of Larkin’s work, the poem’s roots seem painfully, fallibly human. Sexual jealousy makes for unforgettable imagery: ‘Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt,/Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare…’ (Hardy would have cherished that heart-stopping, hyphenated image of the loved one.) But as Martin Amis and others have observed, Larkin also seemed to enter a poetic No Man’s Land in this late, self-probing, almost stunted lyric from 1979; as with the
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Winter Nocturne

December 2011 Nomination: Winter Nocturne [December 1938. From Collected Poems (1988)] My choice reflects the month of shorter days, Philip Larkin’s first published poem, now 73 years old in its original incarnation as printed in his school magazine The Coventrian of December 1938. The embryonic Larkin imagery is already there — the winter nights, the bleakness, the graves of faded summers — as well as what was to become his poetic trade-mark, the killer last line. And remember this is the work of a 16-year-old. The scenes evoked were no doubt inspired by Larkin’s exploration of the local Coventry countryside, its woods and commons. Given sufficient inspiration, imagination and information, armed of course by detailed maps and wearing sturdy footwear, you can still walk in the young poet’s footsteps. Try tracing the muddy paths to Canley Ford or trek over Hearsall and Stivichall Commons to conjure up the sort of atmosphere described in ‘Winter Nocturne’. If
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How to Sleep

June 2010 Nomination: How to Sleep [10 March 1950. From Collected Poems (1988)] Blessed are those whose heads hit the pillow and then sleep like stones until morning. Most of us, from “convent-child” to “Pope” share, with Larkin, that nightly problem of how to find sleep. Everything around the speaker is at rest apart from the “keen moon” which stares in a him as he tosses and turns. And although his mind is clear of concerns which may have kept him awake, his body is still restless and not ready to give in, until at last he returns to the foetal position, the first position all of us take, and he reflects on the elements we need to win the battle for sleep. The curled up position is that of the vulnerable or the coward. It says, “I give in”. Even so, it needs the “nod from nature” that ensures we keep to the
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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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Butterflies

October 2005 Nomination: Butterflies [Winter? 1938–9. From Philip Larkin Early Poems & Juvenilia] The first time I read this poem I felt excited and baffled at the same time: excited because I am obsessed with butterflies as a symbol; baffled because I could not really grasp its meaning. Years later, when I was not only reading Larkin’s poetry but also (alas!) studying it in order to write a thesis, I returned to ‘Butterflies’ and realized that my analysis of Larkin’s creative process should start from it. For several reasons, I was led to read the poem as a reply to one of Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne and, by doing so, I finally had an epiphany concerning its meaning. Thematically, ‘Butterflies’ can be divided into two stanzas. In the first one, young Larkin gives shape to the butterflies as a possible object of desire, and he does so in an impersonal way (the
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The Trees

September 2010 Nomination: The Trees [2 June 1967. From High Windows] I have chosen ‘The Trees’, which I first published in the New Statesman when I was literary editor, on 17 May 1968. I also like the fact that it was one of the first poems to be used in the London ‘Poems on the Underground’ scheme, and a framed version of that early manifestation is in our dining room here in Norfolk. It’s one of the most magically inevitable of Philip’s poems, and at the same time one of the most surprising. When he’d finished it, he asked Monica: ‘Do people still write poems like this?’ Anthony Thwaite
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I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land

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
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