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
Street Lamp
November 2011 Nomination: Street Lamps [September 1939. From Collected Poems (1988)] With so many superb mature works available, why have I chosen a poem written when Larkin was a sixth-former? Because I teach sixth-formers, and although Larkin isn’t on any of our current syllabuses (sorry, we’re to call them “specifications” these days), I have a responsibility to my students to enable them to discover the joy of the work of their own city’s bard. Reading from early work onwards also gives us a way into Auden, Yeats and, above all, Hardy, as we follow the development of this extraordinary and – in his early days – prolific poet. Reading work which was written when Larkin was the same age as they are gives them a real wake-up call: this early stuff is crafted. It is not an unmediated outpouring of (perfectly valid) teenage angst, but it is demonstrably worked on. Lineation, rhyme, rhythm and
Reference Back
November 2010 Nomination: Reference Back [21 August 1955. From The Whitsun Weddings] One (NB: one) of my favourite Larkin poems (they tend to change depending on my mood, the time of year, the weather) is ‘Reference Back’ – for the not very simple reason that it contains in a little room a great deal of what Larkin does best: the tender domestic observance, the subtly-enlarged account of a private moment (in this case between himself and his mother), and the magnificent but un-showy shift from something small-scale to a large philosophical utterance (‘Truly, though our element is time/We are not suited to the long perspectives/Open at each instant of our lives…’). Several of his most powerful poems take one or two of these ingredients and amplify them. Here they are all together. It’s a marvel of economy and synthesis. Andrew Motion
High Windows
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
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
Aubade
May 2006 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977. The Times Literary Supplement 23 December 1977] ‘Aubade’ was published in the Times Literary Supplement in December, 1977. Regarded as his last great poem, it is constantly referenced and deeply revered: for many, an unnervingly unambiguous work of art. The opening line, which sets the stall for the whole piece, must surely have satisfied the expectations of most Larkin enthusiasts at the time: I work all day, and get half drunk at night Straight away we know that this is going to be an honest, intensely personal piece of work. It’s only after several readings, however, that it becomes clear how beautifully written it is; how all rules of rhyme and meter are, forgive me, religiously adhered to and yet, read aloud, it sounds like free form. Constant reference to it is easy. Not unusually for Larkin, there are no lines wasted here. Death pervades his masterpiece just as
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
Administration
October 2008 Nomination: ‘Administration’ [3 March 1965] I worked at the University Library from 1963-1966 as a Library Assistant and made many friends there, with most of whom I still keep in touch. One day in 1965 one of those friends, a particularly attractive girl, was caught by Philip in the stacks being rather too friendly with her then boyfriend, now husband. She is almost certain, because of the date of the poem, that ‘Administration’ was written after a telling-off she was given by Philip over this incident. Amber Allcroft
Afternoons
June 2001 Nomination: Afternoons [September ? 1959. From The Whitsun Weddings] ‘Afternoons’ in some ways is a time capsule since in the poem Larkin observes such things as mothers “setting free” their children at swing and sandpit, a scene that is now perhaps dying out since in today’s world young mothers tend to go into the workplace rather than spend time with their children. [The] poem reminds me about a cinema in my town’s centre that closed down about a year ago and hasn’t been touched, though when you look inside it’s like looking into the past, seeing all the films from a year ago and all the fashion photos. Jonathan Winn
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
Toads Revisited
April 2011 Nomination: Toads Revisited [October 1962. From The Whitsun Weddings] ‘Toads Revisited’ is a favourite of mine from the seminal The Whitsun Weddings collection. On reading it again, and again, I find myself eagerly anticipating the next line, like a satisfying chorus. I was drawn to the poetry of Philip Larkin, because of its similarities to the lyrics and themes encompassed within the best of English ‘popular music’ song writing that has left a lasting impact on me, penned by the likes of Nick Drake, Stephen Morrissey, Roddy Frame, and latterly Thom Yorke. Themes of mortality, boredom, tedium, fear and tragedy feature strongly, and are explored to great effect within this offering. Some wonderful lines leap out at me, and continue to delight on each airing. “Waxed – fleshed out patients / Still vague from accidents” and “Turning over their failures / By some bed of lobelias”. Marvellous! I find myself particularly affected by
Home is so Sad
July 2013 Nomination: Home is so Sad [13 December 1958. From The Whitsun Weddings] I love this poem because it captures something poignant – and true – about our homes but also points out the determined hopefulness with which we live our lives! As a linguist, it is the tension between the syntax and the poetic form that gives me so much pleasure. The poem opens with a very short sentence (Home is so sad) which not only sets the scene, but is universal in its appeal, ‘home’ not having any modification (my home, your home) so that we are forced to see it as home in general that is sad. This statement is then backed up by each of the claims that follow. In the second sentence, the proposition is that home ‘stays as it was left’. This in itself is not sad and in other contexts we might see as a
Next, Please
November 2013 Nomination: Next, Please [16 January 1951] The title although appropriate to its subject, almost does a disservice to the poem. This banal Next, Please, having associations with dreary commercial and bureaucratic exchanges is not much of an invitation to read. Once Larkin has us at the edge of the cliffs however, we remember so well the hours spent waiting for the teasing armada to dock and unload its cargo of opportunity. How loudly this message chimes for those of us who regularly submit to poetry journals and who must wait months for a reply. Will one’s work ever be considered for a collection? I am certainly guilty of investing too much mental effort in anticipation of the future and too little in appreciating the riches of the now. But it’s not just a matter of strong recognition. The final stanza is so cinematic and chilling. The black-sailed unfamiliar, the birdless silence.. Like so much of
Continuing to Live
March 2002 Nomination: Continuing to Live [24 April 1954. From A Keepsake for the New Library] I extracted this poem from Philip under duress for the Keepsake published at the opening of the new library at the School of Oriental & African Studies, where I was then Librarian. I also managed to persuade W H Auden, Edward Brathwaite, Omar Pound, Nathaniel Tarn and Thom Blackburn to contribute original poems for this pamphlet which was designed by Frances Duncan and published for me by John Duncan, then Managing Director of Mansell. So Philip was in good company, and the poem itself I always think is as good as anything else he wrote at the time of The Less Deceived. Barry Cambray Bloomfield
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
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
And Yet
September 2004 Nomination: And Yet [April 1948] It was outside Larkin’s then lodgings in College Street Leicester that Don Lee revealed to the thirty or so walkers this verse found among papers in the Brynmor Jones Library but, so far, unpublished. Larkin’s father, Sydney, died not unexpectedly of cancer in March 1948, an event thought now to be also a turning-point in his son Philip’s writing career. From here, his mature writing style becomes noticeably the voice now established as Larkin. ‘An April Sunday’, in the collected poems of 1987, has become latterly to be recognised as perhaps the first consistent example of it. This however, is different in that it reveals an unusually direct commentary on the father’s attitudes bequeathed to his son and the controlled anger returned. In the week following the Leicester Walk, the poem and its discovery featured in several stories in the UK National Press and on
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
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
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
As Bad As a Mile
September 2014 Nomination: As Bad As a Mile [9 February 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] In the aftermath of the 2014 World Cup, sports journalist Barney Ronay in his Monday Guardian column cited the first four lines of this poem as a pretty fair summary of the England team’s performance over the years: not so much misfortune (‘it went over the line, ref!’) as endemic incapacity to play well. We can have another shy in four years’ time but we’ll end up skidding across the floor. Delighted, as always, to see Larkin once again become part of normal discourse, I rushed back to remind myself of the rest of the poem, a tiny perfection shaped for contemplation, tempting repeated consumption and all that despite the whimsy of a title which promises so little. For the last month, I’ve revisited the poem daily half-hoping that I’ve found the equivalent of Timothy Clark’s experiment with Poussin’s Landscape with