Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin (1922–1985) was born on 9 August 1922 in Coventry, Warwickshire, the son of Sydney Larkin, the city treasurer, and Eva Emily Day. His father was a competent administrator with an enthusiasm for German literature and, troublingly, for Nazi Germany — he attended two Nuremberg rallies and kept a small statue of Hitler on his mantelpiece. The household was not happy, and Larkin’s poetry is pervaded by a sense of constriction, missed opportunity, and the impossibility of escape.

Life and Career

Larkin was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John’s College, Oxford (1940–1943), where he formed a lifelong friendship with Kingsley Amis. He failed his army medical because of poor eyesight and entered librarianship, serving at Wellington, Shropshire (1943–1946), University College Leicester (1946–1950), Queen’s University Belfast (1950–1955), and finally the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull (1955–1985), where he was librarian for thirty years. He never married, never left England (except for brief holidays), and conducted a series of overlapping relationships with women — principally Monica Jones, Maeve Brennan, and Betty Mackereth — with a mixture of devotion and evasiveness that his published letters reveal in painful detail.

His first collection, The North Ship (1945), published by the Fortune Press, was heavily influenced by Yeats and gave little indication of his mature style. The decisive break came with The Less Deceived (1955), published by the Marvell Press in Hessle, Yorkshire, which announced a new voice in English poetry: colloquial, formally precise, wry, and devastating in its emotional honesty. Poems like “Church Going,” “Toads,” and “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” made Larkin famous overnight — or as famous as a poet can be.

The Whitsun Weddings (1964) confirmed his stature. The title poem — an account of a train journey from Hull to London on a Whitsun Saturday, during which the narrator observes newly married couples boarding at each station — is one of the great English poems of the century. High Windows (1974) was darker and more savage; poems like “This Be The Verse” (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”) and “Aubade” (a terrifying meditation on death) became the most quoted lines of his generation.

Larkin published only four principal collections in forty years — an output whose slenderness was itself a statement about artistic integrity. He was offered the Poet Laureateship after John Betjeman’s death in 1984 but declined, unwilling to accept the public obligations. He died of oesophageal cancer on 2 December 1985 in Hull.

Major Works and Themes

Larkin’s poetry is about the ordinary disappointments of English life — failed relationships, dead-end jobs, the passage of time, the approach of death — rendered with a formal perfection and an emotional candour that transforms the mundane into the universal. His language is deliberately plain, almost conversational, but his technical skill — the control of rhythm, the deployment of rhyme and half-rhyme, the precision of the final line — is as accomplished as any poet since Yeats.

“Church Going” (1955) is his most discussed poem: a narrator enters an empty church, uncertain what he is looking for, and arrives at a profound recognition of the human need for places “where a serious house on serious earth” marks the significant moments of life. “The Whitsun Weddings” (1964) achieves its effect through accumulation — the successive images of wedding parties along the railway line gathering into a collective human moment. “Aubade” (1977), written late and published in High Windows, is the most honest poem about the fear of death in the language.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Larkin was the most popular serious poet in England during his lifetime and has remained so since his death. His reputation suffered temporarily after the publication of his letters (1992) and Andrew Motion’s biography (1993), which revealed racist, misogynistic, and politically reactionary views that shocked admirers. The work, however, has survived the biographical revelations. Larkin’s poetry is too good, too deeply felt, and too technically accomplished to be diminished by the failings of its author.

His influence on subsequent English poetry is pervasive: Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, and a generation of poets write in a tradition that Larkin helped define — the tradition of the well-made English poem about ordinary life.

Key Works

• The North Ship (1945)
• Jill (1946) — novel
• A Girl in Winter (1947) — novel
• The Less Deceived (1955)
• The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
• High Windows (1974)
• Required Writing (1983) — criticism
• Collected Poems (1988, posthumous)

Collecting Larkin

Larkin is the most collected English poet of the postwar period. His small output, combined with the modesty of his early print runs, makes first editions of the poetry collections genuinely scarce.

The North Ship (1945, Fortune Press) is his first book of poems. The Fortune Press, run by the dubious R.A. Caton, published it in a tiny run; copies in the original dust jacket are rare and bring $3,000–$10,000.

The Less Deceived (1955, Marvell Press, Hessle) is the key title — the collection that made his reputation. It was published by George and Jean Hartley’s small press in an edition of approximately 700 copies. Copies in the original jacket bring $2,000–$8,000.

The Whitsun Weddings (1964, Faber and Faber) was Larkin’s first Faber collection and is more widely available. Fine copies in jacket bring $500–$2,000.

High Windows (1974, Faber and Faber) was printed in a larger run as Larkin’s reputation was at its peak. Fine copies in jacket bring $200–$800.

Jill (1946, Fortune Press), his first novel, is also collected; copies in jacket bring $1,000–$4,000. A Girl in Winter (1947, Faber) is somewhat easier to find.

Signed Larkin material is uncommon. He was not a public figure in the signing-event sense, and his reclusive temperament meant he inscribed books primarily to friends and colleagues. Signed copies of the poetry collections carry significant premiums. His correspondence — voluminous, witty, and often scandalous — is collected; letters bring $500–$3,000. The major archive is at the Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull.