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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 weekend of Larkin at Stapleford Granary
Over the weekend of 13-15th September visitors to Stapleford Granary near Cambridge were treated to a wonderful combination of Larkin inspired events featuring poetry, talks, music and theatre against the
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Larkin Weekend 13-15 September
The Philip Larkin Society is delighted to be supporting the forthcoming Larkin Weekend at Stapleford Granary near Cambridge. Stapleford Granary is a beautiful Arts Centre with award-winning facilities set in a
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Some Dappled Park: A Poetry Writing Workshop Inspired By Philip Larkin’s Hull
Saturday 21 September 2024 10.00 – 15.30 Join us for a poetry workshop in the park, drawing inspiration from Philip Larkin’s time in Hull. Come join us at Artlink Hull
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POEM REVIEW

Love Songs in Age

September 2005 Nomination: Love Songs in Age [1 January 1957. From The Whitsun Weddings] I love this poem because its opening line reminds me so much of the trauma related to assisting the elderly into moving into nursing homes where the space is limited and the residents are urged to give away their large items and trim living down to a few must have items. I see the woman in this poem having kept her songs…they took such little space. In her reopening them she is swept into the emotional flood of highs and lows, not unlike the songs themselves with stops and such. Larkin’s economy with the words, a staccato with the word choices like the love in the songs, all stopping and starting and stopping. Darryl Duerr
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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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As Bad as a Mile

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
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Afternoons

April 2012 Nomination: Afternoons [September 1959. From The Whitsun Weddings] This poem was written when Philip Larkin lived in his top flat in Pearson Park in Hull. He loved living in a high room, where he could observe the comings and goings of other people. As he walked through the park he used to pass a children’s playground, and what he saw there inspired this bleak poem. I often thought of it when I myself was a young mother in the late 50’s and 60’s, and knew exactly what he meant by “the hollows of afternoons”. But how did Philip know? This poem is an example of his acute observation and imaginative ability to get inside the skin of his subjects. It is a poem that will never date as long as there are young mothers and children and play-grounds. Winifred Dawson [2001]
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No Road

April 2004 Nomination: No Road [28 October 1950. From XX Poems and The Less Deceived] I have always loved it; its music and rhythm, sheer lyrical grace and sadness, and the ‘dying fall’ at the end. Mary Kelly
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Here

December 2009 Nomination: Here [8 October 1961. From The Whitsun Weddings] Being an exile from Hull of more than forty years this poem has had many resonances for me over that time since I headed South in ’68. I had very little knowledge of Larkin or his work while a student at the Art College although this big bloke was once pointed out to me at a College Ball as being the Librarian at Hull Uni and a poet. Well poets then, as far as I was concerned, were called Henri, McGough and Patten and came from Liverpool with Spike Milligan adding a bit of weird hilarity from elsewhere. Having discovered this poem through a friend’s girlfriend who knew Ted Tarling, a friend of PL and having actually read it many times while travelling its journey it will forever remind me of returning to my hometown: ‘That chip shop fifty miles up a
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The Explosion

January 2005 Nomination: The Explosion [5 January 1970. From High Windows] Not the first time this has been chosen, I know, but particularly and tragically relevant. What originally drew me to this poem had been an adolescent, D.H. Lawrence inspired fantasy which may have been partly responsible for my falling for (and marrying) the son of a man who worked underground at Silverwood Colliery, near Maltby. I liked the way that Larkin ennobled the miners, mythologizing them through his imagery and also of course through the allusive metre. As a child I always thought the cowboys were the baddies (not least because they had such short hair); so what with Lawrence and Hiawatha this poem couldn’t fail. But today, with thousands of people dead, lost, missing, bereaved I return to ‘The Explosion’ and its extraordinary capacity to freeze-frame the pivotal, apocalyptic moment between life and death; the nano second in which life is
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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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An Arundel Tomb

May 2011 Nomination: An Arundel Tomb [20 February 1956. From The Whitsun Weddings] This month marks the 5th anniversary of my father – David Rees’ death. Dad was for a time webmaster of the Larkin website, but more than this genuinely loved Larkin’s poetry. When Dad was ill I know that his affinity and understanding of Larkin’s work sustained him. It also provided me with an insight into thoughts and feelings he did not necessarily feel able to express himself. Dad chose this poem to be read at his funeral. I cannot provide any commentary or critical analysis, but this is why the poem is so important to me. Ruth McCann
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For Sidney Bechet

January 2010 Nomination: For Sidney Bechet [15 January 1954. From The Whitsun Weddings] Larkin’s poems with jazz connections reflect the enormous importance that jazz played in his life and work. In his Introduction to All What Jazz (1970), his scalding attack on modernism in all the arts, he says: ‘Few things have given me more pleasure in life than listening to jazz. I don’t claim to be original in this: for the generations that came to adolescence between the wars jazz was that unique private excitement that youth seemed to demand.’ As his letters show, Larkin shared this subversive enthusiasm with Kingsley Amis and they were both insistent about their rigidly traditional tastes. I’ve always felt that the colloquial and ironic aspects of Larkin’s poetic language derive from both the stance and the language of the jazz musician much as the informality of popular song lyrics are reflected in some Auden Sidney Bechet, who played
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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 Mower

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
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To the Sea

April 2003 Nomination: To the Sea [October 1969. From High Windows] As a child our family holidays were always taken somewhere by the seaside where we could spend all day on the beach totally absorbed in whatever we were doing. It always seemed to me as though we had somehow crossed over into another place where time was suspended. Even now as an adult and parent I still love to be at the seaside. There is still that feeling of being in that other place, especially towards the end of the afternoon as the light changes and people start to leave. This poem for me captures the whole atmosphere of the beach, the goings on, the litter. You can see it, hear it, you are there. The way things gradually change as time moves on, the steamer previously stuck in the afternoon is gone, the sunlight turning milky like breathed-on glass, and finally
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At Grass

October 2002 Nomination: At Grass [3 January 1950. From XX Poems and The Less Deceived] ‘At Grass’ (1950) has been used (for example by Alvarez) to exemplify poetic timidity or even sentimentality, but the third stanza is an imaginative triumph. Larkin evokes the race-meeting from the outside, as an event unwitnessed but overheard, so that transience and absence are made manifest in the language: ‘outside, / Squadrons of empty cars, and heat, / And littered grass: then the long cry / Hanging unhushed till it subside / To stop-press columns on the street.’ No human figure appears in these lines and there’s an elegiac undertow, a dying fall built into the plain facts in lines two and three. The enjambment in lines four and five is also quietly dramatic, balanced by the characteristic negative ‘unhushed’. A marvellous piece of work, with instinct and craft exactly combined. Sean O’Brien
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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 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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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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Born Yesterday

July 2004 Nomination: Born Yesterday [20 January 1954. From The Less Deceived] I am a member of the Larkin Society. I included ‘Born Yesterday’ in the episode of Coronation Street for 19th March 2004. It was the christening of Tracy Barlow’s baby, and ‘Born Yesterday’ is the reading. Unfortunately the obligatory soap fracas curtailed its beautiful ending, but I scripted it so we heard the lion’s share. I was delighted to be able to plug my favourite Larkin poem – and it was perfectly suited to the storyline. If you missed the episode, there was an omnibus the following Sunday. You may of course prefer to stick pins in your eyes, but I’m proud to write for Corrie and honoured to honour Philip Larkin. ‘Born Yesterday’ has been my co-favourite (alongside ‘The Whitsun Weddings’) for many years. Congratulations on the web-site – it’s great. What would the great man have made of email and the
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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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The Mower

November 2012 Nomination: The Mower [12 June 1979. From Collected Poems (1988)] I suspect that like most Larkin aficionados of my generation, I first came across Philip Larkin’s poetry when I was at school. Naturally, the poem that most struck a chord with any angst-ridden, rebellious teenager was ‘This Be The Verse’. Even committing this poem to memory felt like a delicious act of subversion. When I first heard Larkin’s unique laconic rendition of this poem, it all made sense. It was Larkin’s ironical detachment and ability to distil complex ideas with lucid language that proved to be appealing. It wasn’t poetry concocted in an ivory tower but poetry rooted in experience. Sometimes, Larkin’s poetry didn’t always make an impact in the classroom, precisely because we were compelled to read it and butcher to death the various poetical tricks that Larkin’s deploys, where all that was crying out was for the language to be
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