WELCOME TOTHE 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. 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.
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
RECENT NEWS
THE PLS PUB QUIZ
This year’s annual commemoration of the anniversary of Larkin’s death was a little different. After last year’s multi-centred ceremonial occasion which featured the unveiling of a Larkin bench in Spring
Forthcoming Events
The Philip Larkin Society AGM and Annual Distinguished Guest Lecture 2024 will be held in Oxford on Saturday 8th June. More details to follow.
POEM REVIEW
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
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
The Large Cool Store
December 2013 Nomination: The Large Cool Store [18 June 1961] This one embodies one of the main reasons I love Larkin’s poetry – the ability to find something transcendent in humdrum everyday lives. It’s a simple poem with a simple theme, but it says something fresh about poetry’s favourite subject, love. The poem was inspired, I have heard, in a visit to Hull’s branch of Marks & Spencer. The first stanza is a brisk tour of the store, where the narrator finds ranks of affordable clothes for ordinary people. These are practical, hard-wearing clothes. The colours are muted – “browns and greys, maroon and navy” to reflect their functional nature. In the second stanza, the narrator reflects on the unglamorous lives of the people who wear these workmanlike clothes (“factory, yard and site”), before walking past Modes for Night – women’s nightwear. The contrast is striking. The colours are seductive and beautiful, although the material
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
Dublinesque
July 2005 Nomination: Dublinesque [6 June 1970. From High Windows] Philip Larkin told Maeve Brennan that ‘Dublinesque’ was “a dream – I just woke up and described it”. Of course, Larkin’s comments on his own poems are frequently misleading and need to be treated with caution: he said of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, “It was just the transcription of a very happy afternoon. I didn’t change a thing… It only needed writing down. Anybody could have done it”. In truth, not only could no-one else have done it but even Larkin needed three years from the time of the original train journey to the date of the poem’s completion. Despite such discrepancies commentators on ‘Dublinesque’ continue to treat it as a beguiling and innocent dreamscape. Much is made of its deft invocation of Dublin in the Victorian or Edwardian period – the women’s “wide flowered hats, / Leg-of-mutton sleeves, / And ankle-length dresses” date
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
Oils
August 2008 Nomination: Oils [14 March 1950. From XX Poems] ‘Oils’ appeared in XX Poems in 1951. It is the first in a diptych of poems, ‘Two Portraits of Sex’, which while not ekphrastic (descriptive of particular pictures), as are ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ or ‘The Card-Players’, hinges on two contrasting techniques of the visual arts. First comes the wet, rich colour of oil-painting, then the dry, acid-traced black and white lines of an etching. Few readers of Larkin are unacquainted with the second poem, originally named ‘Etching’ but republished in The Less Deceived without its companion as ‘Dry-Point’. However, the first poem, ‘Oils’, is generally disregarded. Larkin never republished it and it is certainly not a masterpiece, as is ‘Dry-Point’. However, it is a fascinating poetic exercise, and Larkin’s deliberate mimicking of two pictorial techniques in the literary medium of words shows the ambition and complexity of the challenges he was setting himself on the brink of his
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
Coming
Nomination: Coming [25 February 1950. From XX Poems and The Less Deceived] Larkin is not in any sense a nature poet yet many of his poems such as ‘The Trees’ and ‘First Sight’ celebrate the change of the seasons and, in particular, his excitement at the approach of Spring. ‘Coming’ (1950) is one of these. The contrast here is between the solid brick houses hedged in by laurel bushes and the delicacy of the birdsong and changed light that herald the Spring. I like the way past, present and future are contained in this lyric: the laurel is the modern emblem of the suburban garden yet in Greek mythology it communicated the spirit of prophesy and poetry. The extended simile that closes the poem gives us an image of security and hope that we can all relate to, taking us back to childhood when the moods of our parents were our seasons and all our
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
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
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
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
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
The Whitsun Weddings
August 2012 Nomination: The Whitsun Weddings [18 October 1958. From The Whitsun Weddings] There are so many Larkin poems I could nominate but ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is very special to me. It depicts a train journey (a travelling coincidence) between Hull and Kings Cross that I’ve made many times. I never fail to think of the poem as the train passes the place “where sky and Licolnshire and water meet.” Or to get a sense of what a train journey was like on a hot day in the late 1950s when I read the lines “All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense of being in a hurry gone. It’s a beautiful poem about relationships and destiny, it epitomises Larkin’s peculiarily English genius. Alan Johnson
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
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
This Be The Verse
March 2014 Nomination: This Be The Verse [? April 1971] They fuck you up your mum and dad … has always struck me as a fantastic opening line for a poem. It’s there in your face from the very start. A startling but, at the same time, thought-provoking piece of truth. After working with children and their parents for nearly 40 years, I’m sure that much of what happens to them is down to their parents. The line too that they didn’t mean to is probably equally true in most instances. Most of us choose one of two approaches to being parents. Firstly, we either do it as our own parents did (If it was good enough for me, it’s good enough for them) or we do the direct opposite, taking the view There’s no way I’m going to bring up my children like I was brought up. I always thought it would be nice, once
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