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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
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
Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair
August 2006 Nomination: Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair [15 December 1947. From XX Poems and The North Ship (1966)] Larkin famously divided his poems into the beautiful and the true. To some extent the distinction probably reflected his private feelings about different poems, the different kinds of pleasure or consolation he had found in writing them. But we know what he meant, and we know too that the greatest of his poems, the peaks in his Collected – ‘Church Going’, ‘Here’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Dockery and Son’, ‘To the Sea’, ‘High Windows’, ‘The Old Fools’, ‘The Building’, ‘Aubade’ – are both beautiful and true. Like all his admirers, I’m sure, I love these poems, and they have had a profound effect on what I think poems can and even ought to be. Even more, sometimes, I love the “beautiful” ones among the others – more modest pieces maybe but just as perfect, ‘The Trees’, ‘At
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
An April Sunday brings the snow
April 2002 Nomination: An April Sunday brings the snow [4 April 1948] This short elegy is one of Larkin’s most directly moving poems. It is also his first attempt to write in what was to become his characteristic voice: realistic, melancholic, demotic. Hardy had by now firmly replaced Yeats in Larkin’s affections, and there are strong echoes here of the Hardy of 1912-13. Yet the ‘you’ of the poem is no dead spouse – it’s Larkin’s father – and however much the piece may strike us now as a breakthrough, it signalled twelve months in which its author could write no more verse. Such is the pressure of feeling here, in fact, that Larkin commits an extremely rare metrical lapse, adding an extra foot to line three. I think I’m most impressed by the simplicity of this poem, the way it achieves so much in so few lines. I’m also deeply in
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
The Explosion
January 2013 Nomination: The Explosion [5 January 1970. From High Windows (1970)] Larkin is one of the masters of the English Language and I’m an unqualified reader incapable of judging him on technique and style. I only know I like very much the way he writes. As to what he writes, I enjoy his sceptical, sidelong, look at life; I enjoy how the sort of jagged acidity of self expression at times seems bordering on self distaste; he seems to find a perverse delight in this self distaste. But I love the lyrical terseness that sometimes comes out of him almost as though against his will, as it does in ‘The Trees’, ‘Cut Grass’ (which I particularly love), or ‘At Grass’. It is as though his delight at what he sees overcomes any of his more usual tendencies to make a side-swipe. In ‘The Explosion’, as far as I know, Larkin is detached from
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
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
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
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’,
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
The Building
February 2006 Nomination: The Building [9 February 1972. From High Windows] Looking down the list of previously chosen ‘Poems of the Month’ it was no surprise to find ‘The Building’ wasn’t there. Of all Larkin’s major poems it seems to get mentioned the least (someone will immediately notify me of the six articles, three books and one international conference that have been devoted exclusively to ‘The Building’ in the last month). Nevertheless, there is a natural reluctance to enthuse about it; I can’t see it being anthologised in ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poems’, can you? I’m reminded of Larkin’s ironic exclamation: ‘The Oxford Book of Death! How marvellous!’ in a review of the same. A poem about dying in hospital is always going to have its work cut out competing for our affections with, say, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, that monument to ‘untruth’. Even amongst Larkin fans I detect a certain squeamishness. But then, what
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
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
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
The School in August
January 2006 Nomination: The School in August [1943 From Collected Poems (1988)] The School in August is, I think, the best of Larkin’s early poems, and the least typical. This is the kind of poetry he was desperately trying not to write in his Auden-esque youth: flowery, sing-song, literary. And it has all the surprising charm of a teenager who forgets to be sullen for a moment and lets his natural temperament get through. ‘Make it new’, said Ezra Pound, and his advice has been so taken to heart by poets that even orthodoxy seems too weak a word for it. Poetry should above all be original; the hackeneyed and the threadbare are the supreme foes of art. Turn away from daffodils and churchyards, and disover the poetry lurking in the computer screen and the inner city. And don’t use words like soul or heart or joy; they’re weak from over-work. But what if
Could wish to lose hands
November 2007 Nomination: Could wish to lose hands [before September 1940. From Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenilia] Many reviewers of Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenil (Ed. A T Tolley, Faber, 2005) enormously enjoyed noting the obvious – that the young writer had not yet attained the great distinctive voice of later years. Rather than loftily looking back and down at these poems over the heads of their potent, weighty successors, it is more rewarding to read them as if they were fresh-made by a new poet-on-the-block, a poet decidedly but unpredictably promising. Imitations there are, of course, but all sorts of graces, surprises and suggestions of originality. My choice for Poem of the Month, ‘Could wish to lose hands’, has a startling, jazzy jolt to its rhythms, register and imagery. The energetic wish to conduct creative lightning, contrasted with the desire for river-like absorption into nature, is expressed in a Blakean image rendered
Church Going
March 2006 Nomination: Church Going [28 July 1954. From The Less Deceived] ‘Church Going’, from Larkin’s 1955 collection The Less Deceived, stands out as a masterpiece of rhetoric, introducing a facility with register that launched a thousand imitations. Many readers are encouraged to read ‘Church Going’ as an example of Larkin’s ambivalent relationship with the spiritual. There is little doubt that the everyman persona-narrator who takes us on this by turns solemn and irreverent guided tour experiences both a sense of futility and mystique in equal measure. An overload of sensory impression confronts our narrator upon his arrival, inspiring both bewilderment and that particular quality of ‘hunger’ for understanding he imagines will continue to draw men in. Objects here are represented as finite in their quality and, as such, they possess bathos and pathos in equal measure in this spiritual context. And yet, similarly, the environment gives rise to wonder, a sense of timelessness
The little lives of earth and form
March 2001 Nomination: The little lives of earth and form [6 May 1977. From Collected Poems (1988)] For its tenderness and lyricism. Tom Courtenay