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
Wants
December 2010 Nomination: Wants [1 June 1950. From The Less Deceived] This is the poem that Larkin intones at the end of the Monitor film made with Betjeman in 1964. Once you’ve listened to him reading it, it’s impossible to hear it in any other voice. As he delivers the lines, the camera pulls back and he walks away, as if illustrating the very “wish to be alone” that is the poem’s subject. It is perhaps consciously contradictory (as with so many things about Larkin) that one of the few times he allows film cameras into his life concludes with an expression of wanting to be alone. As an articulation of the forlorn, it is nonetheless a remarkably engaging poem. Interestingly this drive towards isolation is inextricable in the film from images of the city – the mist rising from the canal along which he retreats has more than a Stygian whiff of ‘oblivion’ about
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
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
Aubade
January 2004 Nomination: Aubade [29 November 1977. The Times Literary Supplement 23 December 1977] A sulky fifty-six (Auden) means intimations of mortality are rather more frequent visitors to my mind than I’d like. The oblivion of death is what we all fear I think, and Larkin grabs it by the scruff of its neck and hangs it in front of you in a shivering way. Barry Rutter
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
Mr Bleaney
July 2001 Nomination: Mr Bleaney [May 1955. From The Whitsun Weddings] I am currently studying Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings as part of my A-Level English Literature course, I have become rather attached to “Mr. Bleaney”, the mystery and ambience which surrounds this character fascinates me, how such a grey and apathetic life can have such an affect on a household, and possess an almost immortal quality as his presence is still felt by the next tenant. Lydia Williams
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
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]
Dockery and Son
January 2002 Nomination: Dockery and Son [28 March 1963. From The Whitsun Weddings] ‘Dockery and Son’ succeeds in surprising and delighting us because (and although) it is a such a typical Larkin poem: the themes of youth and age, involvement and isolation, then and now are all characteristic and powerful – and so are the grand but wistful tone, the rising conclusion, the formal dexterity. If I had to choose one Larkin poem to show what he was like at his best, this would be it. Andrew Motion
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
Posterity
June 2006 Nomination: Posterity [17 June 1968. From High Windows] There are so many of Philip Larkin’s poems I could select as my poem of the month, but one I must mention is ‘Posterity’. Several people who knew Larkin speak of his sense of humour amid the Stygian gloom that others have wrapped around him. I recall reading the poem in my early twenties after High Windows came out in 1974. I was at university and recognized the sort of academic that the poem ostensibly satirized because I had worked in what was then the British Museum Library Reading Room, which has since become the British Library in Euston Road. I remembered the overenthusiastic and desperately ambitious type very well. I recalled one specimen giving me chapter and verse on his chosen subject’s upbringing thereby ‘proving’ his thesis about the man and his work. It was only much later on the publication of Motion’s biography,
An Arundel Tomb
April 2014 Nomination: An Arundel Tomb [20 February 1956. From The Whitsun Weddings] My choice of ‘Poem of the Month’ wavered for a while between Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ and his ‘An Arundel Tomb’. (I’m especially interested in ecclesiastical buildings and all they represent.) In the end, though, I’ve chosen the latter, which I’ve admired ever since I first discovered a beautifully inscribed copy of it in Chichester Cathedral, displayed adjacent to where “The earl [of Arundel] and countess [Eleanor, his second wife] lie in stone”. The poet pinpoints one distinctive feature of the sculpture in particular, drawing us back into “pre-baroque” history and then highlighting subsequent changes in society – throughout which his subjects “rigidly persisted”, while “up the paths the endless altered people came”. The poem and what it depicts have a strong, personal resonance for me. I spent 1969-70 at Bishop Otter College in Chichester, which had close links with
Guitar Piece II
November 2002 Nomination: Guitar Piece II [18 September 1946. From Collected Poems (1988)] The second of Larkin’s ‘Two Guitar Pieces’ was completed on 18 September 1946, the month in which the young poet, just turned 24, moved from Wellington to become Assistant Librarian at Leicester University College. Its unrhymed, loosely scanned lines of four or five stresses aim at a casual ‘modern’ tone. The early Auden is echoed in the ‘European’ flavour of ‘platz’, and in the poem’s portentous post-war landscape (‘a man is walking along / A path between the wreckage’); while T. S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Wasteland’ lie behind the final image of the guitar ‘Spreading me over the evening like a cloud, / Drifting, darkening: unable to bring rain.’ Even at this early stage, however, Larkin has his own distinctive voice and images: the faintly lugubrious play on the proverbial ‘poor hand’ we are dealt by Life for instance, and the
The Building
March 2012 Nomination: The Building [9 February 1972. From High Windows] Having suffered a minor stroke at the beginning of the month, I spent the first two weeks of December 2011 in Hull Royal Infirmary. This was my first stay as an in-patient in any hospital for over 50 years. I was occasionally shuttled by porters from the stroke ward to various other departments in order to undergo scans. It was hardly surprising, as I was being manoeuvred through the corridors of the hospital on those short journeys, to find words from Larkin’s ‘The Building’ coming to mind. Specifically: For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those, And more rooms yet, each one further off And harder to return from; Consequently, ‘The Building’ was the first poem I re-read when I returned home, and one of the first I turned to in the Commentaries section when I took delivery of the recently published Philip
The Mower
March 2011 Nomination: The Mower [12 June 1979. From Collected Poems 1988] p>I would like to nominate ‘The Mower’, partly because I have an unaccountable interest in old mowers, partly because of the very precise date of its inspiration (10/06/79), but mostly (98%) because of ‘Next morning I got up and it did not’, and the killer final lines. Doubtless it’s a minority view, but ‘The Mower’ marks the summit of Larkin’s work for me. Combined with the references to the poem’s genesis in various letters, and Monica Jones’s testimony that ‘he came in howling…’, it indicates to me the hidden heart of the man. ‘What will survive’ of him is that ‘we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.’ John Whitbourn
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
The Explosion
January 2003 Nomination: The Explosion [5 January 1970. From High Windows] You really could not accuse Larkin of being Religious. To prove the point, he did read the Bible from cover-to-cover (over several months, each morning, while shaving – and not just any Bible – a £150 Oxford lectern Bible) before dismissing it as balls (beautiful balls, but still balls). Larkin’s belief in complete effacement at death was rarely stated as less than absolute. One can agree (I do) or demur. It does not seem to inhibit Larkin from feeling fully for those from whom we have been cut off – whether a rabbit (‘Myxomatosis’) or miners – a body of people not notably among his usual sympathies. In this, his response to a TV documentary about a distant mining disaster, he shows others’ experience may be both different from his and still be valid. He just may have been prepared to admit
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
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
Love Songs in Age
December 2003 Nomination: Love Songs in Age [1 January 1957. From The Whitsun Weddings] I’ve always had a soft spot for ‘Love Songs in Age’, which was written in the year I was born. Just three sentences, with the first continuing right up to the last line of the second stanza. One of the things I noticed about the poem when I was setting it to music was the high incidence of words containing the ‘s’ sound, which conveys a certain sadness, sympathy or resignation, in as much as it resembles a sigh. Remarkably, in the second stanza of the poem almost 20% – 1 in 5 – words begin with the ‘s’ sound; with nearly as high a percentage in the first stanza. And when you add the number of words containing the ‘s’ sound within them… As usual with a Larkin poem, because of the register, rhythm, rhyme sequence and cadences,