Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. He first came to prominence with the release of his third collection The Less Deceived in 1955. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows followed in 1964 and 1974. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society, and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest post-war writer. During those years, in my reading, I sought out outrageous images and shunned clear-eyed assessments; I sauntered, oblivious, through the topiary gardens of the heart and shunned the desert blooms of the soul. Now that I am in my sixties, however, my inner landscape seems simpler and starker, years of drought having greatly reduced the local population of illusions. And—behold!--the poetry of Philip Larkin looks better all the time. Arguably Larkin’s most seminal poetic work, The Less Deceived was a collection of 29 poems released in 1955 which marked a sea change in his evolution towards becoming the literary colossus he is regarded today. Belonging to a (then) new generation of Angry Young Man writers, Larkin established his own unique voice—cynical yet lyrical, pessimistic yet profound—with an almost effortlessly ingenious ability to reflect the times he was living in. Bradford, Richard. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 2005.

The first poem in it, chronologically, to be written was "Going," of February 1946. It is about death, and, according to Andrew Motion, is the kind of poem for which Larkin "is so often regarded as an unrelievedly pessimistic poet" [6] Its concluding lines, "What is under my hands, / That I cannot feel? / What loads my hands down?", presage the helplessness, the dread of the atrophying of emotion, the despair, and the magnetic terror of death in the poems that follow. These are Larkin's most persistent themes. Throughout the collection, the feeling of diminishment and loss is pervasive, whether in the visit of a cyclist to a church in the volume's best known poem, "Church Going," or in the alienation of the speaker looking at a photograph of a young lady, or in the man in "Toads" beaten by work into an imprisonment he then wills, or even in the "I" who "starts to be happy" when light strikes on the "foreheads" of houses. "Beneath it all," ends the poem "Wants," "desire of oblivion runs." This desire for death simultaneously horrifies and allures. Lines 2-11: “letting the door thud shut. / Another church: matting, seats, and stone, / And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut / For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff / Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; / And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, / Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off / My cycle-clips in awkward reverence, / Move forward, run my hand around the font. / From where I stand, the roof looks almost new—” These two poems present Larkin’s typically ironic approach to the literary tradition. “The Mower” is a highly unconventional garden song. Although its title recalls Andrew Marvell’s poems “The Garden” and “The Mower, Against Gardens,” it shares none of their pastoral innocence or coyness. It finds death, not life, in the world of nature. Similarly, he subverts the traditional use of the aubade form to discuss not the coming day but also a coming night. In both cases, he undermines traditionally upbeat forms. Yet these poems also point to the playfulness of which Larkin was capable even in his bleak est moments, finding amusement in poems of abject despair. That may prove to be his great gift, the ability to face darkness fully, to take it in, and still to laugh, to be ironic even about last things. Leader, Zachary, ed. The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Larkin can be romantic too, yet it is always a desperate romanticism, infected with loss. Perhaps the most moving poems in this collection are the three (“Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album,” “Maiden Name,” and “Latest Face”) which he wrote for Winifred Arnott, a friend from his Belfast days who married someone else. I particularly love the conclusion to “Photograph Album”:Miscellaneous: All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961-1968, 1970; Required Writings: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982, 1984. In stanzas 3 through 7, Larkin reflects on the fate of churches when people stop going altogether—whether they will become places that people will avoid or seek out because of superstition, or become museums, or be turned to some profane use—and wonders, as well, who will be the last person to come to the church and what his reasons will be. Larkin has a sense, conveyed in a number of poems, that he and his generation of skeptics will be the end of religion in England, and in this poem he wonders about the results of that doubting. The final stanza contains yet another shift, this one rather more subtle.As if the “serious house on serious earth” were forcing the poet to be more serious, he shifts away from his musings about its fate, which are after all only another kind of dismissal, and recognizes instead the importance of the place. He suggests, finally, that the shallowness and disbelief of modern people cannot eradicate the impulse to think seriously and seek wisdom that the Church, however outmoded its rituals, represents. The Whitsun Weddings Mary M. Macdermott, Vowel Sounds in Poetry: Their Music and Tone-Colour (unpublished Ph. D. thesis, University of Glasgow, 1941 ) vol. 1, pp. 17–18.

Lines 42-44: “Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique, / Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff / Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?” Take a look at Larkin's likeness, rendered in both paintings and photograph, in the National Portrait Gallery's six portraits of the poet himself. The title of this early collection of Larkin's poems comes from 'Deceptions'--an empathetic reflection on a real-life act of sexual violence ('I would not dare / Console you if I could')--as well as being a reversal of a quote from Hamlet. The poem contains one of the most striking images in the book (with much competition): 'All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives'. Larkin can at times be mordantly humorous. In “If My Darling” he speculates about what his girl might think if she could view the vile contents of his mind (“monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles/ Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate”), in “Toad” he compares his day-job to an intrusive amphibian (“why should I let the toad work squat on my life?), and in “I Remember, I Remember,” he excuses Coventry, the town he lived in for the painfully uneventful first eighteen years of his life, from any specific responsibility (“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”) This is a very short collection (not Larkin's first, but the first one he liked), and I would not wish any of these twenty-nine sharply crafted lyrics away. The title is a reference to Hamlet (Ophelia, when Hamlet says he never loved her, replies “I was the more deceived”) and most of the poems here deal in some way with deception. All of us fall prey to it, Larkin believes, but the sufferer is invariably “less deceived” than her oppressor who, filled with desire—specifically lust in the poem “Deception”--ends up deluded and filled with sadness: “stumbling up the breathless stair/ to burst into fulfillment's desolate attic.” Indeed Larkin can be eloquent--and daring--on the subject of lust, as he is in “Dry Point”:

If Rudyard Kipling’s ( 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) is the poetry of empire, then Philip Larkin’s is the poetry of the aftermath of empire. Having lived through the divestiture of England’s various colonial holdings, the economic impact of empire building having finally come home, together with the ultimate travesty of imperial pretensions and the nightmare of Nazi and Soviet colonization in Europe, Larkin was wary of the expansiveness, the acquisitiveness, and the grandeur implicit in the imperial mentality. Many features of his poetry can be traced to that wariness: from the skepticism and irony, to the colloquial diction, to the formal precision of his poems. The list of poems by Philip Larkin come mostly from the four volumes of poetry published during his lifetime: [1] [2] Lines 38-41: “I wonder who / Will be the last, the very last, to seek / This place for what it was; one of the crew / That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?”