Philip Larkin: Collected Poems

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Love Songs in Age: this one starts off on a light and even sweet note that leaves the reader wholly unprepared for the chilling brutality of the last few lines. This might actually be my absolute favourite. The Literary World - a poem about Tennyson's wife. As the wife of a poet we get a glimpse of the burden she shouldered. A"Complete Poems" is a death certificate and memorial combined. After the Selected and the Collected, the Complete marks the poet's official demise and at the same time erects a carven monument designed to outlast the ages. In the case of this mighty volume of the all of Larkin, there is something too of the coroner's report. The Larkinesquely named Archie Burnett conducts a forensic examination of the poet's imaginative venture, and in the process leaves no headstone unturned. The result is awe-inspiring, exhaustive and faintly risible. Larkin himself would have made merciless fun of it, but the poet, and the librarian, in him would have been immensely pleased and proud.

For the 1988 edition, editor Anthony Thwaite included all of Philip Larkin's published poetry as well as unpublished and incomplete work. Thwaite divided the book into two sections: what he considered the mature (post war) poetry, 1946 - 1983, and juvenilia, 1938 - 1945. Larkin's three most popular and celebrated collections (The Less Deceived, The Witsun Weddings, and The High Window) fall in the first part of the book, but account for just 85 poems, with 87 poems uncollected (or appearing only in the privately printed XX Poems) of which 61 were previously unpublished, a handful of which were clearly unfinished. This section also included Larkin's own unpublished second collection In the Grip of Light). Musing upon the effigies of a medieval earl and countess buried side by side, this poem is a tender meditation on love from one of poetry’s most famous bachelors (Larkin was a bachelor in so far as he never married; he did, however, have relationships with several women – simultaneously, in fact). Like many of Larkin’s poems it takes the form of an internal debate in which the poet discusses two sides of a particular situation, prompted by the witnessing of some event or moment (here, the visit to the Arundel tomb of the title).That we are looking at billboards here was not immediately obvious to me but, once I happily saw the images coming together, I could not help but see them.

High Windows: probably one of the most memorable of Larkin's poems. The poem as a whole is not my cup of tea -- I guess I just can't relate -- but there's something so aesthetically breathtaking about the last stanza, even out of context. Those strengths of craftsmanship and technical skill in Larkin’s mature works received almost universal approval from literary critics. London Sunday Timescorrespondent Ian Hamilton wrote: “Supremely among recent poets, [Larkin] was able to accommodate a talking voice to the requirements of strict metres and tight rhymes, and he had a faultless ear for the possibilities of the iambic line.” David Timms expressed a similar view in his book entitled Philip Larkin.Technically, notes Timms, Larkin was “an extraordinarily various and accomplished poet, a poet who [used] the devices of metre and rhyme for specific effects… His language is never flat, unless he intends it to be so for a particular reason, and his diction is never stereotyped. He [was] always ready… to reach across accepted literary boundaries for a word that will precisely express what he intends.” As King explains, Larkin’s best poems “are rooted in actual experiences and convey a sense of place and situation, people and events, which gives an authenticity to the thoughts that are then usually raised by the poet’s observation of the scene… Joined with this strength of careful social observation is a control over tone changes and the expression of developing feelings even within a single poem… which is the product of great craftsmanship. To these virtues must be added the fact that in all the poems there is a lucidity of language which invites understanding even when the ideas expressed are paradoxical or complex.” New Leadercontributor Pearl K. Bell concludes that Larkin’s poetry “fits with unresisting precision into traditional structures… filling them with the melancholy truth of things in the shrunken, vulgarized and parochial England of the 1970s.”But it was the death of Larkin’s mother, in November of that year, that seems to have inspired him to finish the poem. Yet the poem is about Larkin’s death first and foremost, and offers a stark and harrowing vision of human mortality. Perhaps Larkin’s last great poem. Larkin completed ‘Aubade’ in November 1977, and the poem was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 23 December – ruining quite a few Christmas dinners, as Larkin himself predicted.