Subtotal:
£30.00
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
Essential Beauty
Nomination: Essential Beauty [26 June 1962. From The Whitsun Weddings] Although “Granny Graveclothes’ Tea” must surely be an invention, no doubt there are scholars of Fifties and Sixties advertising who could identify the source of Larkin’s images in this underdiscussed poem. It is a fine example of how Larkin could pictorialise thought while “thinking in verse”. In this case he plays off the perfections of idealised products with the realities of disappointment and death. Part of the final image, the smoker, must be “the lonely man” from one of ITV’s early ads, and which was very famous in its time, iconic in fact, and now preserved for ever in a higher form of art. In a radio programme edited by George MacBeth, Ted Hughes said “Philip Larkin’s poetry is very sad, and the sadder it is the better I like it.” I quote from memory. I was in the studio and was astonished
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
A Study of Reading Habits
February 2011 Nomination: A Study of Reading Habits [20 August 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] I was fifteen when I found ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ in an untravelled corner of a poetry anthology used in my high school. For a bright and lonely adolescent, just beginning to understand the realities of the world, there were no better words to be penned than Larkin’s elegy to his own youth: “the dude who lets the girl down before the hero arrives, the chap who’s yellow and keeps the store, seem far too familiar.” Neil Sander
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
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
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
Pigeons
December 2012 Nomination: Pigeons [First published in Departure January 1957] In September 1956 Philip wrote a letter to his mother which contained the following paragraph: I’m glad you heard the two programmes. I purred with pleasure at Stephen Potter’s appreciation and have sent him a copy……. The Hull programme was all right but I thought the poems were read badly. The one about Pigeons was written at Grantham when we were there at Christmas — they were on a roof opposite the hotel and I watched them through the short afternoons as we sat in the lounge. Do you remember them? I expect not. You were asleep most of the time. Eva Larkin had been in hospital and Philip had obtained permission to take her out over the 1955 Christmas holiday. He and his mother spent what must have been a very lonely time there . And why Grantham? I think he would have
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
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
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
Take One Home for the Kiddies
July 2003 Nomination: Take One Home for the Kiddies [13 August 1960. From The Whitsun Weddings] I have chosen this seemingly simple Larkin poem because it beautifully exemplifies the way I feel about animals and just how cruel humans can be to them. It makes me feel “Yes, I know what you mean, life is like that”. I also like it because it shows a side of Larkin that is all too often ignored – the caring, compassionate, loving and gentle side; the man Maeve Brennan knew, who was sad that he had accidentally killed a hedgehog. And yet the poem is cutting, incisive and sharply focused. Every word counts. The word “huddled” for instance is perfectly chosen to create an image of misery, distress and despair, whilst the “empty bowls” add to the sense of neglect suffered by these animals. When I was a girl there was a pet shop in West
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
An Arundel Tomb
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
Bridge for the Living
June 2014 Nomination: Bridge for the Living [December 1975. Poetry Book Society Supplement, (Christmas 1981)] In Chapter 7 of his most recent monograph, Radical Larkin: Seven Types of Technical Mastery, John Osborne challenges James Booth’s claim that Larkin: ‘waits for the right time to use a word, will not use it until that time comes, and then, if at all possible, never uses it again.’ Osborne goes on to write of ‘the innumerable small-scale rehearsals of diction, phrasing and cadence scattered throughout the oeuvre‘ that constitute the radical self-citation evident in Larkin’s late masterpiece ‘Aubade’. Such self-citation, specifically in ‘Aubade’, could be viewed as symbolising a life review flashing by in response to the prospect of imminent death and extinction: the near-death experience of the poem itself. An examination of ‘Bridge for the Living’ (written just two years before ‘Aubade’) reveals a similar density of self-citation the symbolism of which might be interpreted as a
The Mower
July 2014 Nomination: The Mower [12 June 1979 Hull Literary Club magazine, (Autumn 1979)] In his brilliant 2008 book Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence, John Osborne notes that ‘Ignorance’ is something of a manifesto for Philip Larkin, laying out a modus operandi that informs his entire poetic sensibility. I would concur, adding ‘If, My Darling’, which reveals a similar level of detail in a different way. But I would also add a third poem, which I consider his most crucial: the late elegiac masterpiece, ‘The Mower’. If the first two are maps for Larkin’s wariness and cognitive dissonance, then the third is at the core of his poetry’s feeling. The elegant rise from a tragically mauled garden-creature to the heartfelt conclusion enshrines, more explicitly and touchingly than any other poem in the corpus, the recurring emotions that make his writing simultaneously everyday and transcendent. Its form is a continuation of Larkin’s conversation with what F. R. Leavis held
Like the train’s beat
June 2002 Nomination: Like the train’s beat [1943–4. From The North Ship] When I first read it, the image leapt to life, so much so that I dreamed of writing a novel in which a character would see a young woman, somehow see her as familiar, and later learn that her mother was a Polish airgirl in England during the war… Reading it again now, it’s the last four lines which speak strongest. Stephen Brown
Here
May 2008 Nomination: Here [8 October 1961. From The Whitsun Weddings] I was recently doing some work on Larkin when my flatmate came into the room. As she was completely ignorant of Larkin and his poetry I handed her the Collected Poems, opened on ‘Here’ and she duly proceeded to read the poem. It took her some time, being German and not being a literature student, but she finally handed back the volume with tears in her eyes and said: ‘I would never have found these words to say it, but I know exactly what he is trying to say.’ In one single sentence, under the influence of one single poem, my friend had not only captured the essence of Larkin’s poetry but had also involuntarily almost quoted the poet himself: ‘I want people to say: “Yes, that’s it, I know exactly what he means.”‘ It is this recognition of the self that renders
Aubade
May 2014 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977 Times Literary Supplement, (23 December 1977)] ‘Aubade’ is a poem that makes me happy. No line in the poem is happy. None of the poem’s thoughts are designed to express happiness. Novice student readers find it repellent. The way a crow shook down on Robert Frost the dust of snow from a hemlock tree once rescued Frost from a day he had rued. So too has ‘Aubade’ lightened my mood and refilled my sails. I don’t need to wait upon grace to send a crow since ‘Aubade’ is one of the few poems I have committed to memory – not an easy thing for this sluggish mind. It is a poem that begs to be memorized. I love exclaiming my lines while walking the always deserted back road outside our summer house on the Bay of Fundy. The words are a choir of beautiful sound, a
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
The Trees
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