Philip Larkin

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|quote='You look as if you wished the place in Hell,'

My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,

I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.'

|source=from "I Remember, I Remember" (1954),
The Less Deceived

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Philip Larkin was born on 9 August 1922 at 2 Poultney Road, Radford, Coventry,{{cite web |url=http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=larkph |title=Philip Larkin © Orlando Project |publisher=Orlando.cambridge.org |date=2 December 1985 |access-date=17 April 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160513034249/http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=larkph |archive-date=13 May 2016 |url-status=live }} the only son and younger child of Sydney Larkin (1884–1948) and his wife Eva Emily (1886–1977), daughter of first-class excise officer William James Day. Sydney Larkin's family originated in Kent, but had lived since at least the eighteenth century at Lichfield, Staffordshire, where they worked first as tailors, then also as coach-builders and shoe-makers. The Day family were from Epping, Essex, but moved to Leigh, Lancashire in 1914 where William Day took a post administering pensions and other dependent allowances.Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Andrew Motion, Faber and Faber, 2018, pp. 1-2

Larkin's family lived in the district of Radford, Coventry, until Larkin was five years old,Motion 1993, pp. 8,10. before moving to a large three-storey middle-class house complete with servants' quarters near Coventry railway station and King Henry VIII School, in Manor Road. Having survived the bombings of the Second World War, their former house in Manor Road was demolished in the 1960s to make way for a road modernisation programme,Motion 1993, p. 10. the construction of an inner ring road. His sister Catherine, known as Kitty, was 10 years older than he was.{{cite web

|url=http://www.philiplarkin.com/biog.htm

|title=Philip Larkin 1922–1985

|publisher=The Philip Larkin Society

|access-date=16 September 2010

|first=James L

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|archive-date=9 February 2010

}}

His father, a self-made man who had risen to be Coventry City Treasurer, was a singular individual, 'nihilistically disillusioned in middle age',Larkin, letter to Monica Jones, 7 August 1953, Letters to Monica, p. 106. who combined a love of literature with an enthusiasm for Nazism, and had attended two Nuremberg rallies during the mid-1930s.Bradford 2005, p. 25. He introduced his son to the works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and above all D. H. Lawrence.Bradford 2005, p. 26. His mother was a nervous and passive woman, "a kind of defective mechanism...Her ideal is 'to collapse' and to be taken care of",Larkin to Monica Jones, 8 April 1955, Letters to Monica, p. 148. dominated by her husband.Motion 1993, p. 11.

File:Spinny -Poultney Road -Coventry 28y08.jpg council house overlooking a small spinney, once their garden (photo 2008)|alt=Larkin's parents' former Radford council house overlooks a small spinney, once their garden. The spinney is on the corner of two roads. It is a lawn, maintained by the Coventry City Council groundsmen, with some mature trees and bushes around the perimeter as seen in 2008]]

Larkin's early childhood was in some respects unusual: he was educated at home until the age of eight by his mother and sister, neither friends nor relatives ever visited the family home, and he developed a stammer.Bradford 2005, pp. 28, 31. When he joined Coventry's King Henry VIII Junior School he fitted in immediately and made close, long-standing friendships, such as those with James "Jim" Sutton, Colin Gunner and Noel "Josh" Hughes. Although home life was relatively cold, Larkin enjoyed support from his parents. For example, his deep passion for jazz was supported by the purchase of a drum kit and a saxophone, supplemented by a subscription to DownBeat. From the junior school he progressed to King Henry VIII Senior School. He fared quite poorly when he sat his School Certificate exam at the age of 16. Despite his results, he was allowed to stay on at school. Two years later he earned distinctions in English and History, and passed the entrance exams for St John's College, Oxford, to read English.Bradford 2005, p. 38.

Larkin began at Oxford University in October 1940, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War. The old upper-class traditions of university life had, at least for the time being, faded, and most of the male students were studying for highly truncated degrees.Bradford 2005, p. 39. Due to his poor eyesight, Larkin failed his military medical examination and was able to study for the usual three years.Motion, p. 72 Through his tutorial partner, Norman Iles, he met Kingsley Amis, who encouraged his taste for ridicule and irreverence and who remained a close friend throughout Larkin's life.{{cite web|url=http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8770871/two-angry-old-men/|title=Two angry old men – The Spectator|date=1 December 2012|publisher=spectator.co.uk|access-date=6 April 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130830070827/http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8770871/two-angry-old-men/|archive-date=30 August 2013|url-status=live}}

Amis, Larkin and other university friends formed a group they dubbed "The Seven", meeting to discuss each other's poetry, listen to jazz, and drink enthusiastically. During this time he had his first real social interaction with the opposite sex, but made no romantic headway.Bradford 2005, p. 59. In 1943 he sat his finals, and, having dedicated much of his time to his own writing, was greatly surprised at being awarded a first-class honours degree.Motion 1993, p. 104.

{{see also|Relationships that influenced Philip Larkin}}

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|quote=Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the brute off?

|source=from "Toads" (1954), The Less Deceived

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In 1943 Larkin was appointed librarian of the public library in Wellington, Shropshire. It was while working there that in early 1944 he met his first girlfriend, Ruth Bowman, an academically ambitious 16-year-old schoolgirl.Bradford 2005, pp. 68–9. In 1945, Ruth went to continue her studies at King's College London; during one of his visits their friendship developed into a sexual relationship. By June 1946, Larkin was halfway through qualifying for membership of the Library Association and was appointed assistant librarian at University College, Leicester. It was visiting Larkin in Leicester and witnessing the university's Senior Common Room that gave Kingsley Amis the inspiration to write Lucky Jim (1954), the novel that made Amis famous and to whose long gestation Larkin contributed considerably.Motion 1993, p. 238. Six weeks after his father's death from cancer in March 1948, Larkin proposed to Ruth, and that summer the couple spent their annual holiday touring Hardy country.Bradford 2005, p. 70.

In June 1950 Larkin was appointed sub-librarian at The Queen's University of Belfast, a post he took up that September. Before his departure he and Ruth split up. At some stage between the appointment to the position at Queen's and the end of the engagement to Ruth, Larkin's friendship with Monica Jones, a lecturer in English at Leicester, also developed into a sexual relationship. He spent five years in Belfast, which appear to have been the most contented of his life. While his relationship with Jones developed, he also had "the most satisfyingly erotic [experience] of his life" with Patsy Strang, who at the time was in an open marriage with one of his colleagues.Bradford 2005, p. 100.

At one stage she offered to leave her husband to marry Larkin. From 1951 onwards Larkin holidayed with Jones in various locations around the British Isles. While in Belfast he also had a significant though sexually undeveloped friendship with Winifred Arnott, the subject of "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album", which came to an end when she married in 1954. This was the period in which he gave Kingsley Amis extensive advice on the writing of Lucky Jim. Amis repaid the debt by dedicating the finished book to Larkin.Hartley 1989, p. 7.

File:Philip Larkin -Flat in Hull 1.jpg was Larkin's rented accommodation from 1956 to 1974 (photo 2008).|alt=Larkin's former second-floor flat in Hull was part of a building of conventional red-brick construction in a residential area.]]

In 1955 Larkin became University Librarian at the University of Hull, a post he held until his death.Motion 1993, pp. 244–245 Professor R. L. Brett, who was chairman of the library committee that appointed him and a friend, wrote, "At first I was impressed with the time he spent in his office, arriving early and leaving late. It was only later that I realised that his office was also his study where he spent hours on his private writing as well as the work of the library. Then he would return home and on a good many evenings start writing again."{{cite web|url=http://www.philiplarkin.com/pdfs/essays/psycho-literary_sketch_rbrett.pdf |author=Brett |year=1996 |title=Philip Larkin at Hull: A Psycho-Literary Sketch |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130903140224/http://www.philiplarkin.com/pdfs/essays/psycho-literary_sketch_rbrett.pdf |archive-date=3 September 2013 }} For his first year he lodged in bedsits. In 1956, at the age of 34, he rented a self-contained flat on the top-floor of 32 Pearson Park, a three-storey red-brick house overlooking the park, previously the American Consulate.Motion 1993, p. 276. This, it seems, was the vantage point later commemorated in the poem High Windows.Bradford 2005, p.154

Of the city itself Larkin commented: "I never thought about Hull until I was here. Having got here, it suits me in many ways. It is a little on the edge of things, I think even its natives would say that. I rather like being on the edge of things. One doesn't really go anywhere by design, you know, you put in for jobs and move about, you know, I've lived in other places."Larkin, speaking on BBC's Monitor, 15 December 1964

In the post-war years, Hull University underwent significant expansion, as was typical of British universities during that period. When Larkin took up his appointment there, the plans for a new university library were already far advanced. He made a great effort in just a few months to familiarize himself with them before they were placed before the University Grants Committee; he suggested a number of emendations, some major and structural, all of which were adopted. It was built in two stages, and in 1967 it was named the Brynmor Jones Library after Sir Brynmor Jones, the university's vice-chancellor.

One of Larkin's colleagues at Hull said he became a great figure in post-war British librarianship.Goodman 1997, p. 4. Ten years after the new library's completion, Larkin computerized records for the entire library stock, making it the first library in Europe to install a Geac computer system, an automated online circulation system. Richard Goodman wrote that Larkin excelled as an administrator, committee man and arbitrator. "He treated his staff decently, and he motivated them", Goodman said. "He did this with a combination of efficiency, high standards, humour and compassion."Goodman 1997, p. 7 He rejected the Net Book Agreement.Ball, D., 2012. "Managing suppliers for collection development: the UK higher education perspective." In: Fieldhouse, M. and Marshall, A., eds. Collection Development in the Digital Age. London: Facet, 111-124. From 1957 until his death, Larkin's secretary was Betty Mackereth. All access to him by his colleagues was through her, and she came to know as much about Larkin's compartmentalized life as anyone.Bradford 2005, p. 241, which includes a quote from Motion 1993, p. 282. During his 30 years there, the library's stock sextupled, and the budget expanded from £4,500 to £448,500, in real terms a twelvefold increase.Goodman 1997, p. 10

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|quote=Dockery, now:

Only nineteen, he must have taken stock

Of what he wanted, and been capable

Of . . . No, that's not the difference: rather how

Convinced he was he should be added to!

Why did he think adding meant increase?

To me it was dilution.

|source=from "Dockery and Son" (1963),
The Whitsun Weddings

|width=300px

}}

In February 1961 Larkin's friendship with his colleague Maeve Brennan became romantic, despite her strong Roman Catholic beliefs.Bradford 2005, p. 183. In early 1963 Brennan persuaded him to go with her to a dance for university staff, despite his preference for smaller gatherings. This seems to have been a pivotal moment in their relationship, and he memorialised it in his longest (and unfinished) poem "The Dance".Bradford 2005, p. 199. Around this time, also at her prompting, Larkin learnt to drive and bought a car – his first, a Singer Gazelle.Letters to Monica, p. 326. Meanwhile, Monica Jones, whose parents had died in 1959, bought a holiday cottage in Haydon Bridge, near Hexham,Bradford 2005, pp. 181 & 193. which she and Larkin visited regularly.Motion 1993, p. 319.Blank reference His poem "Show Saturday" is a description of the 1973 Bellingham show in the North Tyne valley.Motion 1993, p. 437.

In 1964, following the publication of The Whitsun Weddings, Larkin was the subject of an edition of the arts programme Monitor, directed by Patrick Garland.Down Cemetery Road, closing credits. The programme, which shows him being interviewed by fellow poet John Betjeman in a series of locations in and around Hull, allowed Larkin to play a significant part in the creation of his own public persona; one he would prefer his readers to imagine.Bradford 2005, p. 203.

In 1968, Larkin was offered the OBE, which he declined. Later in life he accepted the offer of being made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16736495|title=BBC News – Queen's honours: People who have turned them down named|work=BBC Online|access-date=12 June 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161126094501/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16736495|archive-date=26 November 2016|url-status=live}} In 1976, the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded Larkin its annual Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his life's work.

Larkin's role in the creation of Hull University's new Brynmor Jones Library had been important and demanding. Soon after the completion of the second and larger phase of construction in 1969,Bradford 2005, p. 217. he was able to redirect his energies. In October 1970, he started to work on compiling a new anthology, The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). He was awarded a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, for two academic terms, allowing him to consult Oxford's Bodleian Library, a copyright library. While he was in Oxford he passed responsibility for the Library to his deputy, Brenda Moon. Larkin was a major contributor to the re-evaluation of the poetry of Thomas Hardy, which, in comparison to his novels, had been overlooked; in Larkin's "idiosyncratic" and "controversial" anthology,Motion 1993, p. 407.Motion 1993, p. 431. Hardy was the poet most generously represented. There were twenty-seven poems by Hardy, compared with only nine by T. S. Eliot (however, Eliot is most famous for long poems); the other poets most extensively represented were W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden and Rudyard Kipling. Larkin included six of his own poems—the same number as for Rupert Brooke. In the process of compiling the volume he had been disappointed not to find more and better poems as evidence that the clamour over the Modernists had stifled the voices of traditionalists. The most favourable responses to the anthology were those of Auden and John Betjeman, while the most hostile was that of Donald Davie, who accused Larkin of "positive cynicism" and of encouraging "the perverse triumph of philistinism, the cult of the amateur ... [and] the weakest kind of Englishry". After an initial period of anxiety about the anthology's reception, Larkin enjoyed the clamour.Bowen 2008, p. 107.

File:Philip Larkin -house in Hull 1.jpg, was Larkin's home from 1974 to his death in 1985 (photo 2008).|alt=Larkin lived in a comfortable residential area in Hull at No.105, Newland Park in a detached house of red brick construction. Doors on the first floor at the front of the house open onto a small balcony. As seen in 2008 part of the walls at the front of the house are covered with a green climbing plant, but a round commemorative plaque is visible]]

In 1971, Larkin regained contact with his schoolfriend Colin Gunner, who had led a picaresque life.{{Cite web |title=Gunner, Colin (Oral history) |url=https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80010746 |access-date=2024-06-29 |website=Imperial War Museums |language=en}} Their subsequent correspondence has gained notoriety as Larkin expressed right-wing views and used racist language.{{cite web

|url=http://www.hull.ac.uk/arc/collection/philiplarkin/colls.html

|title=Papers of Philip Larkin (known as the Larkin Estate Collection)

|publisher=Hull University

|year=2008

|access-date=6 May 2009

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090124122700/http://www.hull.ac.uk/arc/collection/philiplarkin/colls.html

|archive-date=24 January 2009

|url-status=live

}} In the period from 1973 to 1974, Larkin became an Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and was awarded honorary degrees by Warwick, St Andrews and Sussex universities. In January 1974, Hull University informed Larkin that they were going to dispose of the building on Pearson Park in which he lived. Shortly afterwards he bought a detached two-storey 1950s house in Newland Park which was described by his university colleague John Kenyon as "an entirely middle-class backwater". Larkin, who moved into the house in June, thought the four-bedroom property "utterly undistinguished" and reflected, "I can't say it's the kind of dwelling that is eloquent of the nobility of the human spirit".Motion 1993, p. 440.

Shortly after splitting up with Maeve Brennan in August 1973, Larkin attended W. H. Auden's memorial service at Christ Church, Oxford, with Monica Jones as his official partner.Motion 1993, p. 438. In March 1975, the relationship with Brennan restarted, and three weeks after this he initiated a secret affair with Betty Mackereth, who served as his secretary for 28 years, writing the long-undiscovered poem "We met at the end of the party" for her.{{cite web

|first=Eric

|last=McHenry

|url=http://www.slate.com/id/2078368/

|title=High Standards

|work=Slate

|date=10 February 2003

|access-date=6 May 2009

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090510103743/http://www.slate.com/id/2078368

|archive-date=10 May 2009

|url-status=live

}} Despite the logistical difficulties of having three relationships simultaneously, the situation continued until March 1978. From then on he and Jones were a monogamous couple.Bradford 2005, p. 245.

In 1976, Larkin was the guest of Roy Plomley on BBC's Desert Island Discs. His choice of music included "Dallas Blues" by Louis Armstrong, Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis and the Symphony No. 1 in A flat major by Edward Elgar. His favourite piece was "I'm Down in the Dumps" by Bessie Smith.{{cite web|url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009n0l8|title=Philip Larkin, Desert Island Discs – BBC Radio 4|publisher=bbc.co.uk|access-date=6 April 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151230040821/http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009n0l8|archive-date=30 December 2015|url-status=live}}

In December 2010, as part of the commemorations of the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death, the BBC broadcast a programme entitled Philip Larkin and the Third Woman focusing on his affair with Mackereth in which she spoke for the first time about their relationship. It included a reading of a newly discovered secret poem, Dear Jake, and revealed that Mackereth was one of the inspirations for his writings.{{cite news

|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11909126

|title=Unpublished Philip Larkin poem found

|date=5 December 2010

|work=BBC News Online

|publisher=BBC

|access-date=7 December 2010

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101207082858/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11909126

|archive-date=7 December 2010

|url-status=live

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|quote=Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

|source=from "Aubade" (1977), Collected Poems

}}

Larkin turned sixty in 1982. This was marked most significantly by a collection of essays entitled Larkin at Sixty, edited by Anthony Thwaite and published by Faber and Faber.Thwaite 1982. There were also two television programmes: an episode of The South Bank Show presented by Melvyn Bragg in which Larkin made off-camera contributions, and a half-hour special on the BBC that was devised and presented by the Labour Shadow Cabinet Minister Roy Hattersley.Motion 1993, p. 494.

In 1983, Jones was hospitalised with shingles, a skin rash. The severity of her symptoms, including its effects on her eyes, distressed Larkin. As her health declined, regular care became necessary: within a month she moved into his Newland Park home and remained there for the rest of her life.Motion 1993, p. 498.

File:Philip Larkin -headstone at Cottingham municipal cemetery, near Hull, England-24May2008.jpg, East Riding of Yorkshire|alt=Headstone marking Larkin's grave at Cottingham Cemetery, Cottingham, East Riding of Yorkshire. The headstone is light-grey and has a ground level built-in vase for flowers on its right side. When seen in 2008 there was a small green bush growing just to its left. The headstone is inscribed with the words "Philip Larkin 1922–1985 Writer" on three lines with the dates on the middle line. It is situated in a cemetery with other headstones.]]

At the memorial service for John Betjeman, who died in July 1984, Larkin was asked if he would accept the post of Poet Laureate. He declined, not least because he felt he had long since ceased to be a writer of poetry in a meaningful sense.Bradford 2005, p. 260. The following year, Larkin began to suffer from oesophageal cancer. On 11 June 1985, he underwent surgery, but his cancer was found to have spread and was inoperable. On 28 November, he collapsed and was readmitted to hospital. He died four days later, on 2 December 1985, at the age of 63, and was buried at Cottingham municipal cemetery near Hull.Motion 1993, p. 524.

Larkin had asked on his deathbed that his diaries be destroyed. The request was granted by Jones, the main beneficiary of his will, and Betty Mackereth; the latter shredded the unread diaries page by page, then had them burned.Motion 1993, p. 522. His will was found to be contradictory regarding his other private papers and unpublished work; legal advice left the issue to the discretion of his literary executors, who decided the material should not be destroyed.Motion 1993, p. xvi. When she died on 15 February 2001, Jones, in turn, left £1 million split between St Paul's Cathedral, Hexham Abbey and Durham Cathedral, and another £1 million to the National Trust.{{cite news

|first=John

|last=Ezard

|url=https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jan/12/books.booksnews

|title=Larkin's lover bequeaths to church £1m of poet's agnostic legacy

|publisher=Guardian News and Media Limited

|work=The Guardian

|date=13 January 2002

|location=London

|access-date=12 December 2016

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160306170621/http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jan/12/books.booksnews

|archive-date=6 March 2016

|url-status=live

}} Larkin is commemorated with a green plaque on The Avenues, Kingston upon Hull.

{{further|Brunette Coleman}}

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|quote=And kneel upon the stone,
For we have tried
All courages on these despairs,
And are required lastly to give up pride,
And the last difficult pride in being humble.

|source=from "Come then to prayers" (1946), Collected Poems

|width=300px

}}

From his mid-teens, Larkin "wrote ceaselessly", producing both poetry, initially modelled on Eliot and W. H. Auden, and fiction: he wrote five full-length novels, each of which he destroyed shortly after their completion.Bradford 2005, pp. 32–34. While he was at Oxford University, his first published poem, "Ultimatum", appeared in The Listener. He developed a pseudonymous alter ego in this period for his prose: Brunette Coleman. Under this name he wrote two novellas, Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Brides (2002), as well as a supposed autobiography and an equally fictitious creative manifesto called "What we are writing for". Richard Bradford has written that these curious works show "three registers: cautious indifference, archly overwritten symbolism with a hint of Lawrence and prose that appears to disclose its writer's involuntary feelings of sexual excitement".Bradford 2005, p. 51.

After these works, Larkin began to write his first published novel Jill (1946). This was published by Reginald A. Caton, a publisher of barely legal pornography, who also issued serious fiction as a cover for his core activities.Bradford 2005, p. 55. Around the time that Jill was being prepared for publication, Caton inquired of Larkin if he also wrote poetry. This resulted in the publication, three months before Jill, of The North Ship (1945), a collection of poems written between 1942 and 1944 which showed the increasing influence of Yeats. Immediately after completing Jill, Larkin started work on the novel A Girl in Winter (1947), completing it in 1945. This was published by Faber and Faber and was well received, The Sunday Times calling it "an exquisite performance and nearly faultless".Bradford 2005, p. 77. Subsequently, he made at least three concerted attempts at writing a third novel, but none developed beyond a solid start.Bradford 2005, p. 75.

File:William Butler Yeat by George Charles Beresford.jpg, whose poetry was an influence on Larkin in the mid-1940s|alt=A posed black and white photograph of Yeats. He is wearing smart clothes and spectacles, while his hair looks a bit tousled]]

It was during Larkin's five years in Belfast that he reached maturity as a poet.Bradford 2005, p. 103. The bulk of his next published collection of poems, The Less Deceived (1955), was written there, though eight of the twenty-nine poems included were from the late 1940s. This period also saw Larkin make his final attempts at writing prose fiction, and he gave extensive help to Kingsley Amis with Lucky Jim, which was Amis's first published novel. In October 1954 an article in The Spectator made the first use of the title The Movement to describe the dominant trend in British post-war literature.Motion 1993, p. 242. Poems by Larkin were included in a 1953 PEN Anthology that also featured poems by Amis and Robert Conquest, and Larkin was seen to be a part of this grouping.Motion 1993, p. 243. In 1951, Larkin compiled a collection called XX Poems which he had privately printed in a run of just 100 copies. Many of the poems in it subsequently appeared in his next published volume.

In November 1955, The Less Deceived, was published by the Marvell Press, an independent company in Hessle near Hull (dated October). At first the volume attracted little attention, but in December it was included in The Times{{'}} list of Books of the Year.Motion 1993, p. 269. From this point, the book's reputation spread and sales blossomed throughout 1956 and 1957. During his first five years in Hull, the pressures of work slowed Larkin's output to an average of just two-and-a-half poems a year, but this period saw the writing of some of his best-known poems, such as "An Arundel Tomb", "The Whitsun Weddings" and "Here".{{cite book

|first= Philip

|last=Larkin

|title=Collected Poems

|year=1988

|pages= 110–11, 114–5, 136–7}}

In 1963, Faber and Faber reissued Jill, with the addition of a long introduction by Larkin that included much information about his time at Oxford University and his friendship with Kingsley Amis. This acted as a prelude to the publication the following year of The Whitsun Weddings, the volume which cemented his reputation; a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature was granted to Larkin almost immediately. In the years that followed, Larkin wrote several of his most best-known poems, followed in the 1970s by a series of longer and more sober poems, including "The Building" and "The Old Fools".{{cite book

|first= Philip

|last=Larkin

|title=Collected Poems

|year=1988

|pages= 191–3, 196–7, 208–9}}

All of these appeared in Larkin's final collection, High Windows, which was published in June 1974. Its more direct use of language meant that it did not meet with uniform praise; nonetheless it sold over twenty thousand copies in its first year alone. For some critics it represents a falling-off from his previous two books,Swarbrick 1995, pp. 122–23. yet it contains a number of his much-loved pieces, including "This Be The Verse" and "The Explosion", as well as the title poem. "Annus Mirabilis" (Year of Wonder), also from that volume, contains the frequently quoted observation that sexual intercourse began in 1963, which the narrator claims was "rather late for me". Bradford, prompted by comments in Maeve Brennan's memoir, suggests that the poem commemorates Larkin's relationship with Brennan moving from the romantic to the sexual.Bradford 2005, p. 212.

Later in 1974 he started work on his final major published poem, "Aubade". It was completed in 1977 and published in 23 December issue of The Times Literary Supplement.Motion 1993, p. 468. After "Aubade" Larkin wrote only one poem that has attracted close critical attention, the posthumously published and intensely personal "Love Again".Bradford 2005, pp. 249–251.

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|quote=I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.

|source=from "Aubade" (1977), Collected Poems

|width=300px

}}

Larkin's poetry has been characterized as combining "an ordinary, colloquial style", "clarity", a "quiet, reflective tone", "ironic understatement" and a "direct" engagement with "commonplace experiences",Moran 2002, p. 151. while Jean Hartley summed his style up as a "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent".{{cite web

|url=http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7076

|title=Philip Larkin (1922–1985)

|publisher=Poetryarchive.org

|year=2008

|access-date=6 May 2009

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090507171728/http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7076

|archive-date=7 May 2009

|url-status=dead

}}

Larkin's earliest work showed the influence of Eliot, Auden and Yeats, and the development of his mature poetic identity in the early 1950s coincided with the growing influence on him of Thomas Hardy. The "mature" Larkin style, first evident in The Less Deceived, is "that of the detached, sometimes lugubrious, sometimes tender observer", who, in Hartley's phrase, looks at "ordinary people doing ordinary things". He disparaged poems that relied on "shared classical and literary allusions – what he called the myth-kitty, and the poems are never cluttered with elaborate imagery."Jean Sprackland, speaking on The Whitsun Weddings BBC Radio Four, 1 December 2013 [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03jyp1k] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131210021049/http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03jyp1k|date=10 December 2013}} Larkin's mature poetic persona is notable for its "plainness and scepticism". Other recurrent features of his mature work are sudden openings and "highly-structured but flexible verse forms".

File:Thomashardy restored.jpg was the influence that helped Larkin reach his mature style.|alt=A black and white photograph of Hardy from his late middle age. He is wearing smart, formal clothes, such as a stiff collar and tie. He has a well-tended handlebar moustache]]

Terence Hawkes has argued that while most of the poems in The North Ship are "metaphoric in nature, heavily indebted to Yeats's symbolist lyrics", the subsequent development of Larkin's mature style is "not ... a movement from Yeats to Hardy, but rather a surrounding of the Yeatsian moment (the metaphor) within a Hardyesque frame". In Hawkes's view, "Larkin's poetry ... revolves around two losses": the "loss of modernism", which manifests itself as "the desire to find a moment of epiphany", and "the loss of England, or rather the loss of the British Empire, which requires England to define itself in its own terms when previously it could define 'Englishness' in opposition to something else."Hawkes 1995, p. 285.

In 1972, Larkin wrote the oft-quoted "Going, Going", a poem which expresses a romantic fatalism in its view of England that was typical of his later years. In it he prophesies a complete destruction of the countryside, and expresses an idealised sense of national togetherness and identity: "And that will be England gone ... it will linger on in galleries; but all that remains for us will be concrete and tyres". The poem ends with the blunt statement, "I just think it will happen, soon."{{cite book

|first=Philip

|last=Larkin

|title=Collected Poems

|year=1988

|page=190}}

Larkin's style is bound up with his recurring themes and subjects, which include death and fatalism, as in his final major poem "Aubade".Motion 1993, pp. 468–9. Poet Andrew Motion observes of Larkin's poems: "their rage or contempt is always checked by the ... energy of their language and the satisfactions of their articulate formal control". Motion contrasts two aspects of his poetic personality—on the one hand, an enthusiasm for "symbolist moments" and "freely imaginative narratives", and on the other a "remorseless factuality" and "crudity of language". Motion defines this as a "life-enhancing struggle between opposites", and concludes that his poetry is typically "ambivalent": "His three mature collections have developed attitudes and styles of ... imaginative daring: in their prolonged debates with despair, they testify to wide sympathies, contain passages of frequently transcendent beauty, and demonstrate a poetic inclusiveness which is of immense consequence for his literary heirs."{{cite book

|first=Andrew

|last=Motion

|title= Philip Larkin and Symbolism

|editor-first=Stephen

|editor-last=Regan

|year=1997

|pages= 32, 49–50, 52–53

|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan

|isbn=978-0-333-60483-0}}

Larkin was a critic of modernism in contemporary art and literature. His scepticism is at its most nuanced and illuminating in Required Writing, a collection of his book reviews and essays,James 1983. and at its most inflamed and polemical in his introduction to his collected jazz reviews, All What Jazz, drawn from the 126 record-review columns he wrote for The Daily Telegraph between 1961 and 1971, which contains an attack on modern jazz that widens into a wholesale critique of modernism in the arts.{{cite journal

|last1=Leggett

|first1=B.J

|title=Larkin's Blues: Jazz and Modernism

|journal=Twentieth Century Literature

|issue=Summer, 1996

|url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n2_v42/ai_19259725/pg_4?tag=artBody;col1

|archive-url=https://archive.today/20120712233210/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n2_v42/ai_19259725/pg_4?tag=artBody;col1

|url-status=dead

|archive-date=12 July 2012

|publisher=Hofstra University

}}

Larkin (not unwillingly) acquired a reputation as an enemy of modernism, but recent critical assessments of Larkin's writings have identified them as possessing some modernist characteristics.Corcoran 2007, p. 147.

{{Quote box |quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=center

|quote=Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get.

|source=from "The Life with a Hole in it" (1974),
Collected Poems

|width=300px

}}

When first published in 1945, The North Ship received just one review, in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, which concluded "Mr Larkin has an inner vision that must be sought for with care. His recondite imagery is couched in phrases that make up in a kind of wistful hinted beauty what they lack in lucidity. Mr Larkin's readers must at present be confined to a small circle. Perhaps his work will gain wider appeal as his genius becomes more mature?"Motion 1993, p. 132. A few years later, though, the poet and critic Charles Madge came across the book and wrote to Larkin with his compliments.Motion 1993, p. 191. When the collection was reissued in 1966, it was presented as a work of juvenilia, and the reviews were gentle and respectful; the most forthright praise came from Elizabeth Jennings in The Spectator: "few will question the intrinsic value of The North Ship or the importance of its being reprinted now. It is good to know that Larkin could write so well when still so young."Motion 1993, pp. 358–60.

The Less Deceived was first noticed by The Times, who included it in its List of Books of 1955. In its wake many other reviews followed; "most of them concentrated ... on the book's emotional impact and its sophisticated, witty language." The Spectator felt the collection was "in the running for the best published in this country since the war"; G. S. Fraser, referring to Larkin's perceived association with The Movement felt that Larkin exemplified "everything that is good in this 'new movement' and none of its faults".Bradford 2005, p. 144. The Times Literary Supplement called him "a poet of quite exceptional importance".

In June 1956, the Times Educational Supplement was fulsome: "As native as a Whitstable oyster, as sharp an expression of contemporary thought and experience as anything written in our time, as immediate in its appeal as the lyric poetry of an earlier day, it may well be regarded by posterity as a poetic monument that marks the triumph over the formless mystifications of the last twenty years. With Larkin poetry is on its way back to the middlebrow public."Motion 1993, p. 275. Reviewing the book in America, the poet Robert Lowell wrote: "No post-war poetry has so caught the moment, and caught it without straining after its ephemera. It's a hesitant, groping mumble, resolutely experienced, resolutely perfect in its artistic methods."Motion 1993, p. 328.

In time, there was a counter-reaction: David Wright wrote in Encounter that The Less Deceived suffered from the "palsy of playing safe". In April 1957, Charles Tomlinson wrote a piece for the journal Essays in Criticism, "The Middlebrow Muse", attacking The Movement's poets for their "middle-cum-lowbrowism", "suburban mental ratio" and "parochialism"—Larkin had a "tenderly nursed sense of defeat".Motion 1993, p. 281. In 1962, A. Alvarez, the compiler of an anthology entitled The New Poetry, accused Larkin of "gentility, neo-Georgian pastoralism, and a failure to deal with the violent extremes of contemporary life".

File:The Arundel Tomb at Chichester Cathedral (3).JPG of the Earl of Arundel and his wife Eleanor of Lancaster was the inspiration for Larkin's poem "An Arundel Tomb"|alt=The tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel in Chichester Cathedral, which is topped by a life-size sculpture of the couple. An unusual feature of the sculpture is central to Larkin's poem "An Arundel Tomb": "Such plainness of the pre-baroque / Hardly involves the eye, until / It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still / Clasped empty in the other, and / One sees, with a sharp tender shock, / His hand withdrawn, holding her hand"]]

When The Whitsun Weddings was released, Alvarez continued his attacks in a review in The Observer, complaining of the "drab circumspection" of Larkin's "commonplace" subject-matter. Praise outweighed criticism; John Betjeman felt Larkin had "closed the gap between poetry and the public which the experiments and obscurity of the last fifty years have done so much to widen." In The New York Review of Books, Christopher Ricks wrote of the "refinement of self-consciousness, usually flawless in its execution" and Larkin's summoning up of "the world of all of us, the place where, in the end, we find our happiness, or not at all." He felt Larkin to be "the best poet England now has."Motion 1993, p. 343.Bradford 2005, p. 202.

In his biography, Richard Bradford writes that the reviews for High Windows showed "genuine admiration" but notes that they typically encountered problems describing "the individual genius at work" in poems such as "Annus Mirabilis", "The Explosion" and "The Building" while also explaining why each were "so radically different" from one another. Robert Nye in The Times overcame this problem "by treating the differences as ineffective masks for a consistently nasty presence".Bradford 2005, p. 238

In Larkin at Sixty, amongst the portraits by friends and colleagues such as Kingsley Amis, Noel Hughes and Charles Monteith and dedicatory poems by John Betjeman, Peter Porter and Gavin Ewart, the various strands of Larkin's output were analysed by critics and fellow poets: Andrew Motion, Christopher Ricks and Seamus Heaney looked at the poems, Alan Brownjohn wrote on the novels, and Donald Mitchell and Clive James looked at his jazz criticism.

{{Quote box

|quoted=true

|bgcolor=#FFFFF0

|salign=center

|quote=Isolate rather this element
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me

|source=from "Love Again" (1974), posthumously published

|width=300px

}}

In 1980, Neil Powell wrote: "It is probably fair to say that Philip Larkin is less highly regarded in academic circles than either Thom Gunn or Donald Davie".Powell 1980, p. 83. But since the turn of the century, Larkin's standing has increased. "Philip Larkin is an excellent example of the plain style in modern times", writes Tijana Stojkovic.Stojkovic 2006, p. 37. Robert Sheppard asserts: "It is by general consent that the work of Philip Larkin is taken to be exemplary".Sheppard 2005, p. 23. "Larkin is the most widely celebrated and arguably the finest poet of the Movement", states Keith Tuma, and his poetry is "more various than its reputation for dour pessimism and anecdotes of a disappointed middle class suggests".

Stephen Cooper's Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer and John Osborne's "Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence" suggest the changing temper of Larkin studies, the latter attacking eminent critics such as James Booth and Anthony Thwaite for their readiness to reduce the poems to works of biography, and stressing instead the genius of Larkin's universality and deconstructionism. Cooper argues that "The interplay of signs and motifs in the early work orchestrates a subversion of conventional attitudes towards class, gender, authority and sexual relations".Cooper 2004, p. 1. Cooper identifies Larkin as a progressive writer, and perceives in the letters a "plea for alternative constructs of masculinity, femininity and social and political organisation".Cooper 2004, p. 2. Cooper draws on the entire canon of Larkin's works, as well as on unpublished correspondence, to counter the image of Larkin as merely a racist, misogynist reactionary. Instead he identifies in Larkin what he calls a "subversive imagination".Cooper 2004, p. 3. He highlights in particular "Larkin's objections to the hypocrisies of conventional sexual politics that hamper the lives of both sexes in equal measure".Cooper 2004, p. 179.

In similar vein to Cooper, Stephen Regan notes in an essay entitled "Philip Larkin: a late modern poet" that Larkin frequently embraces devices associated with the experimental practices of Modernism, such as "linguistic strangeness, self-conscious literariness, radical self-questioning, sudden shifts of voice and register, complex viewpoints and perspectives, and symbolist intensity".Corcoran 2007, p. 149.

A further indication of a new direction in the critical valuation of Larkin is Sisir Kumar Chatterjee's statement that "Larkin is no longer just a name but an institution, a modern British national cultural monument".Chatterjee 2007, p. 4.

Chatterjee's view of Larkin is grounded in a detailed analysis of his poetic style. He observes a development from Larkin's early works to his later ones, which sees his style change from "verbal opulence through a recognition of the self-ironising and self-negating potentiality of language to a linguistic domain where the conventionally held conceptual incompatibles – which are traditional binary oppositions between absolutes and relatives, between abstracts and concretes, between fallings and risings and between singleness and multiplicity – are found to be the last stumbling-block for an artist aspiring to rise above the impasse of worldliness".Chatterjee 2007, p. 331. This contrasts with an older view that Larkin's style barely changed over the course of his poetic career. Chatterjee identifies this view as being typified by Bernard Bergonzi's comment that "Larkin's poetry did not ... develop between 1955 and 1974".Chatterjee 2007, p. 14. For Chatterjee, Larkin's poetry responds strongly to changing "economic, socio-political, literary and cultural factors".Chatterjee 2007, p. 18.

File:King Edward Street Kingston upon Hull in 1963 (2) - geograph.org.uk - 678599.jpg".|alt=Trolley buses on Hull's King Edward Street in 1963, two years after Larkin finished "Here"]]

Chatterjee argues: "It is under the defeatist veneer of his poetry that the positive side of Larkin's vision of life is hidden".Chatterjee 2007, p. 356. This positivity, suggests Chatterjee, is most apparent in his later works. Over the course of Larkin's poetic career: "The most notable attitudinal development lay in the zone of his view of life, which from being almost irredeemably bleak and pessimistic in The North Ship, became more and more positive with the passage of time".Chatterjee 2007, p. 19.

The view that Larkin is not a nihilist or pessimist, but actually displays optimism in his works, is certainly not universally endorsed, but Chatterjee's study suggests the degree to which old stereotypes of Larkin are now being transcended. Representative of these stereotypes is Bryan Appleyard's judgement (quoted by Maeve Brennan) that of the writers who "have adopted a personal pose of extreme pessimism and loathing of the world ... none has done so with quite such a grinding focus on littleness and triviality as Larkin the man".Brennan 2002, p. 109. Recent criticism of Larkin demonstrates a more complex set of values at work in his poetry and across the totality of his writings.Ingelbien 2002, p. 13.

The debate about Larkin is summed up by Matthew Johnson, who observes that in most evaluations of Larkin "one is not really discussing the man, but actually reading a coded and implicit discussion of the supposed values of 'Englishness' that he is held to represent".Johnson 2007, p. 66. Changing attitudes to Englishness are reflected in changing attitudes to Larkin, and the more sustained intellectual interest in the English national character, as embodied in the works of Peter Mandler for instance, pinpoint one key reason why there is an increased scholarly interest in Larkin.Ingelbien 2002, p. 196.

A summative view similar to those of Johnson and Regan is that of Robert Crawford, who argues that "In various ways, Larkin's work depends on, and develops from, Modernism." Furthermore, he "demonstrates just how slippery the word 'English' is".Crawford 2000, p. 276.

Despite these recent developments, Larkin and his circle are nonetheless still firmly rejected by modernist critics and poets. For example, the poet Andrew Duncan, writing of The Movement on his pinko.org website,{{cite web|url=http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/poets/duncan.htm |title=Biography of Andrew Duncan |publisher=Soton.ac.uk |date=12 February 2004 |access-date=15 September 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091001022115/http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/poets/duncan.htm |archive-date=1 October 2009 }} is of the opinion that "there now seems to be a very wide consensus that it was a bad thing, and that Movement poems are tedious, shallow, smug, sententious, emotionally dead, etc. Their successors in the mainstream retain most of these characteristics. Wolfgang Gortschacher's book on Little Magazine Profiles ... shows ... that there was a terrific dearth of magazines during the 50s—an impoverishment of openings which correlates with rigid and conservative poetry, and with the hegemony of a few people determined to exclude dissidents."Notes on the poetry of the 1940s: [http://www.pinko.org/108.html Pinko.org] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080706092047/http://www.pinko.org/108.html |date=6 July 2008 }}

Peter Riley, a participant in the British Poetry Revival, which was a reaction against The Movement's poets, has also criticised Larkin for his uncritical and ideologically narrow position: "What after all were Larkin and The Movement but a denial of the effusive ethics of poetry from 1795 onwards, in favour of 'This is what life is really like' as if anyone thought for a second of representing observable 'life'. W.S. Graham and Dylan Thomas knew perfectly well that 'life' was like that, if you nominated it thus, which is why they went elsewhere."{{cite web

|url=http://jacketmagazine.com/26/rile-grah.html

|title=Jacket 26 – Peter Riley reviews W.S. Graham, "New Collected Poems"

|editor=Matthew Francis

|publisher=Jacketmagazine.com

|access-date=1 May 2009

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090515172020/http://jacketmagazine.com/26/rile-grah.html

|archive-date=15 May 2009

|url-status=live

}}

{{further|Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985}}

Larkin's posthumous reputation was deeply affected by the publication in 1992 of Anthony Thwaite's edition of his letters and, the following year, his official biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life by Andrew Motion.{{cite web

|url=https://www.questia.com/read/1G1-14925962

|title=They turn on Larkin

|first=Gary

|last=Kissick

|date=Winter 1994

|publisher=The Antioch Review

}}{{Dead link|date=September 2023 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} These revealed his obsession with pornography, his racism, his increasing shift to the political right wing,{{cite web |url=https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2013/dec/07/dinner-with-margaret-thatcher-literary |title=Dinner with Margaret Thatcher: the story of a secret supper |last1=Farndale |first1=Nigel |author-link=Nigel Farndale |date=7 December 2013 |website=The Observer |access-date=7 December 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131208110138/http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2013/dec/07/dinner-with-margaret-thatcher-literary |archive-date=8 December 2013 |url-status=live }} and his habitual expressions of venom and spleen. In 1990, even before the publication of these two books, Tom Paulin wrote that Larkin's "obscenity is informed by prejudices that are not by any means as ordinary, commonplace, or acceptable as the poetic language in which they are so plainly spelled out."Paulin 1990.

The letters and Motion's biography fuelled further assessments of this kind, such as Lisa Jardine's comment in The Guardian that "The Britishness of Larkin's poetry carries a baggage of attitudes which the Selected Letters now make explicit". On the other hand, the revelations were dismissed by the novelist Martin Amis in The War Against Cliché, arguing that the letters in particular show nothing more than a tendency for Larkin to tailor his words according to the recipient. A similar argument was made by Richard Bradford in his biography on Larkin from 2005.Bradford 2005, pp. 210 & 224.Motion 1993, p. 332. Commenting on Letters to Monica

(2010) Graeme Richardson states that the collection went "some way towards the restoration of Larkin's tarnished image...reveal(ing) Larkin as not quite the sinister, black-hearted near-rapist everyone thought it was OK to abuse in the 90s."Richardson, G. "Larkin the Porn Star Poet", Areté 33, Winter 2010, pp. 77–90.

Trying to resolve Larkin's contradictory opinions on race in his book Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin, the writer Richard Palmer quotes a letter Larkin wrote to Betjeman, as if it exposes "all the post-Motion and post-Letters furore about Larkin's 'racism' as the nonsense it is":

The American Negro is trying to take a step forward that can be compared only to the ending of slavery in the nineteenth century. And despite the dogs, the hosepipes and the burnings, advances have already been made towards giving the Negro his civil rights that would have been inconceivable when Louis Armstrong was a young man. These advances will doubtless continue. They will end only when the Negro is as well-housed, educated and medically cared for as the white man.

Reviewing Palmer's book, John G. Rodwan, Jr. proposes that:

a less forgiving reader could counter by asking if this does not qualify as the thought of a "true racist":

I find the state of the nation quite terrifying. In 10 years' time we shall all be cowering under our beds as hordes of blacks steal anything they can lay their hands on.

Or this:

We don't go to cricket Test matches now, too many fucking niggers about.{{cite web

|first=John G.

|last=Rodwan, Jr.

|url=http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/issue/january-2009-larkin-coltrane/

|title=Ugly on Purpose: Philip Larkin and John Coltrane

|publisher=Open Letters Monthly

|date=January 2009

|access-date=18 November 2009

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181229123936/https://www.openlettersmonthly.com/issue/january-2009-larkin-coltrane/

|archive-date=29 December 2018

|url-status=live

}}

Despite controversy about his personal life and opinions, Larkin remains one of Britain's most popular poets. In 2003, almost two decades after his death, Larkin was chosen as "the nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society,[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3193692.stm "Larkin is nation's top poet"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080212003552/http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3193692.stm |date=12 February 2008 }} BBC News 15 October 2003 and in 2008 The Times named Larkin as the greatest British post-war writer.[http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3083819.ece "The 50 greatest postwar writers"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080706141213/http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3083819.ece |date=6 July 2008 }} The Times, 5 January 2008. Three of his poems, "This Be The Verse", "The Whitsun Weddings" and "An Arundel Tomb", featured in the Nation's Top 100 Poems as voted for by viewers of the BBC's Bookworm in 1995.{{cite book

|author=Griff Rhys Jones (Foreword)

|author-link=Griff Rhys Jones

|title=The Nation's Favourite Poems

|publisher=BBC Books

|year=1996

|isbn=0-563-38487-5}}

Media interest in Larkin has increased in the twenty-first century. Larkin's collection The Whitsun Weddings is one of the available poetry texts in the AQA English Literature A Level syllabus,{{cite web

|url=http://www.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/pdf/AQA-2720-W-SP-10.PDF

|format=PDF

|publisher=Assessment and Qualifications Alliance

|title=GCE: AS and A Level Specification: Section 3.4

|year=2007

|access-date=15 November 2008

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080905024646/http://www.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/pdf/AQA-2720-W-SP-10.PDF

|archive-date=5 September 2008

|url-status=dead

}}

while High Windows is offered by the OCR board.{{cite web|url=http://www.ocr.org.uk/Data/publications/past_papers_2006_January/GCSE_English_Literature_2442_02_January_2006_Question_Paper.pdf |format=PDF |publisher=Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations |date=12 January 2006 |title=GCSE: English Literature |access-date=15 November 2008 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081218200728/http://www.ocr.org.uk/Data/publications/past_papers_2006_January/GCSE_English_Literature_2442_02_January_2006_Question_Paper.pdf |archive-date=18 December 2008 }}

Buses in Hull displayed extracts from his poems in 2010.{{cite news

|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/england/humberside/10538324.stm

|title=Hull buses display Larkin's words in tribute to poet

|work=BBC News Online

|publisher=BBC

|date=7 July 2010

|access-date=14 July 2010

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100710194701/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/england/humberside/10538324.stm

|archive-date=10 July 2010

|url-status=live

}}

The Centennial of Larkin's birth was celebrated in 2022."[https://www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/Larkin Miles Leeson reflects on the significance of Larkin on the centenary of his birth, 9 August 2022.]" Literature Cambridge.Manley, Jeff. "Still Larkin Around: The Philip Larkin Centenary (9 August 2022)." The Anthony Powell Newsletter 88 (Autumn 2022): 12-19.

{{Quote box

|quoted=true

|bgcolor=#FFFFF0

|salign=center

|quote=In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.

|source=from "Faith Healing" (1960), The Whitsun Weddings

|width=300px

}}

In 1959, the Marvell Press published Listen presents Philip Larkin reading The Less Deceived (Listen LPV1), an LP record on which Larkin recites all the poems from The Less Deceived in the order they appear in the printed volume.Bloomfield 2002, p. 140. This was followed, in 1965, by Philip Larkin reads and comments on The Whitsun Weddings (Listen LPV6), again on the Marvell Press's record label (though the printed volume was published by Faber and Faber). Once again the poems are read in the order in which they appear in the printed volume, but with Larkin including introductory remarks to many of the poems.Bloomfield 2002, p. 141. A recording of Larkin reading the poems from his final collection, High Windows, was published in 1975 as British poets of our time. Philip Larkin; High Windows: poems read by the author (edited by Peter Orr) on the Argo record label (Argo PLP 1202).Bloomfield 2002, p. 142. As with the two previous recordings, the sequencing of the poems is the same as in the printed volume.

Larkin also appears on several audio poetry anthologies: The Jupiter Anthology of 20th Century English Poetry – Part III (JUR 00A8), issued in 1963 and featuring "An Arundel Tomb" and "Mr Bleaney" (this same recording was issued in the United States in 1967 on the Folkways record label as Anthology of 20th Century English Poetry – Part III (FL9870)); The Poet Speaks record 8 (Argo PLP 1088), issued in 1967 and featuring "Wants", "Coming", "Nothing to be Said", "Days" and "Dockery and Son"; On Record (YA3), issued in 1974 by Yorkshire Arts Association and featuring "Here", "Days", "Next, Please", "Wedding-Wind", "The Whitsun Weddings", "XXX", "XIII" (these last two poems from The North Ship); and Douglas Dunn and Philip Larkin, issued in 1984 by Faber and Faber (A Faber Poetry cassette), featuring Larkin reading 13 poems including, for the first time on a recording, "Aubade".

Despite the fact that Larkin made audio recordings (in studio conditions) of each of his three mature collections, and separate recordings of groups of poems for a number of audio anthologies, he somehow gained a reputation as a poet who was reluctant to make recordings in which he read his own work.{{cite episode

|url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0091tmv

|network=BBC

|station=Radio 4

|series=Archive Hour

|title=The Larkin Tapes

|airdate=1 March 2008

|access-date=22 September 2011

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120326170515/http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0091tmv

|archive-date=26 March 2012

|url-status=live

}} While Larkin did express a dislike of the sound of his own voice ("I come from Coventry, between the sloppiness of Leicester and the whine of Birmingham, you know—and sometimes it comes out"),{{cite book

|first=Philip

|last=Larkin

|title=Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews 1952–1985

|year=2001

|page=36}}

the evidence indicates that this influenced more his preference not to give public readings of his own work, than his willingness to make audio recordings of his poems.

In 1980, Larkin was invited by the Poets' Audio Center, Washington, to record a selection of poems from the full range of his poetic output for publication on a Watershed Foundation cassette tape.Orwin 2008, p. 21 The recording was made in February 1980 (at Larkin's own expense)Orwin 2008, p. 23 by John Weeks, a sound engineer colleague from the University of Hull.Orwin 2008, p. 20 Although negotiations between Larkin, his publishers and the Watershed Foundation collapsed,Orwin 2008, p. 22 the recording (of Larkin reading 26 poems selected from his four canonical volumes of poetry) was sold – by Larkin – to Harvard University's Poetry Room in 1981.

In 2004, a copy of this recording was uncovered in the Hornsea garage studio of the engineer who had made the recording for Larkin. (Subsequently, Larkin's own copy of the recording was found in the Larkin Archive at the University of Hull.)Orwin 2008, p. 24 News of the "newly discovered" recording made the headlines in 2006, with extracts being broadcast in a Sky News report.{{cite web

|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QugmT1SEIcg

|title=Philip Larkin – The Lost Tapes

|publisher=YouTube (originally broadcast by Sky News on 14 February 2006)

|date=2 February 2007

|access-date=6 May 2009

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140626061240/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QugmT1SEIcg

|archive-date=26 June 2014

|url-status=live

}} A programme examining the discovery in more depth, The Larkin Tapes, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2008. The recordings were issued on CD by Faber and Faber in January 2009 as The Sunday Sessions.

In contrast to the number of audio recordings of Larkin reading his own work, there are very few appearances by Larkin on television. The only programme in which he agreed to be filmed taking part is Down Cemetery Road (1964), from the BBC Monitor series, in which Larkin was interviewed by John Betjeman.{{cite web

|url=http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/286641

|publisher=BFI

|title=Film & TV Database: Philip Larkin: Broadcast (1964) on BBC One

|access-date=21 June 2007

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071108204427/http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/286641

|archive-date=8 November 2007

|url-status=dead

}} The filming took place in and around Hull (with some filming in North Lincolnshire), and showed Larkin in his natural surroundings: his flat in Pearson Park, the Brynmor Jones Library; and visiting churches and cemeteries. The film was broadcast on BBC Four.{{cite web

|url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00drs8w

|title=Monitor: Down Cemetery Road

|publisher=BBC

|access-date=11 November 2008

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110317084140/http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00drs8w

|archive-date=17 March 2011

|url-status=live

}} In 1981, Larkin was part of a group of poets who surprised John Betjeman on his seventy-fifth birthday by turning up on his doorstep with gifts and greetings. This scene was filmed by Jonathan Stedall and later featured in the third episode of his 1983 series for BBC2, Time With Betjeman.{{cite web

|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1739097/

|title=Time with Betjeman

|publisher=Internet Movie database (IMDb)

|access-date=12 April 2012

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120406075949/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1739097/

|archive-date=6 April 2012

|url-status=live

}}

In 1982, as part of the celebrations for his sixtieth birthday, Larkin was the subject of The South Bank Show.{{cite news

|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jul/05/poetry.highereducation

|publisher=Guardian News and Media Limited

|work=The Guardian

|first=Andrew

|last=Motion

|title=A fanfare for the common man

|date=5 July 2003

|location=London

|access-date=12 December 2016

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170626042617/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jul/05/poetry.highereducation

|archive-date=26 June 2017

|url-status=live

}} Although Larkin declined the invitation to appear in the programme, he recorded (on audio tape) "a lot of poems"Thwaite 1992, p. 651 specifically for it. Melvyn Bragg commented, in his introduction to the programme, that the poet had given his full cooperation. The programme, broadcast on 30 May, featured contributions from Kingsley Amis, Andrew Motion and Alan Bennett. Bennett was also filmed reading several Larkin poems a few years later, in an edition of Poetry in Motion, broadcast by Channel 4 in 1990.{{cite web

|url=http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/450744

|title=Poetry in Motion: Philip Larkin

|publisher=British Film Institute

|access-date=6 May 2009

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090519002353/http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/450744

|archive-date=19 May 2009

|url-status=dead

}}

In 1999, Oliver Ford Davies starred in Ben Brown's play Larkin With Women at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, reprising his role at the Orange Tree Theatre, London, in 2006. The play was published by Larkin's usual publishers, Faber and Faber. Set in the three decades after Larkin's arrival in Hull, it explores his long relationships with Monica Jones, Maeve Brennan and Betty Mackereth.{{cite news

|url=https://www.theguardian.com/stage/1999/nov/13/theatre1

|title=Life limited by love – Larkin with Women

|last=Billington

|first=Michael

|date=13 November 1999

|work=The Guardian

|publisher=Guardian News and Media Limited

|access-date=12 November 2009

|location=London

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140508024625/http://www.theguardian.com/stage/1999/nov/13/theatre1

|archive-date=8 May 2014

|url-status=live

}} Another Larkin-inspired entertainment, devised by and starring Sir Tom Courtenay, was given a pre-production performance in June 2002 at Hull University's Middleton Hall.István D. Rácz. "Larkin in Context: The Second International Conference on the Work of Philip Larkin" About Larkin No. 14 October 2002 p.24 Courtenay performed his one-man play Pretending to Be Me as part of the Second Hull International Conference on the Work of Philip Larkin.

In November that year, Courtenay debuted the play at the West Yorkshire Playhouse,{{cite news

|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/2146504.stm

|work=BBC News

|title=Courtenay pens Larkin tribute

|date=23 July 2002

|access-date=9 August 2010

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20040614021853/http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/2146504.stm

|archive-date=14 June 2004

|url-status=live

}} later transferring the production to the Comedy Theatre in London's West End.{{cite news

|last=Spencer

|first=Charles

|date=20 February 2003

|title=Great acting, great jokes – and the peerless poetry of Philip Larkin

|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3590158/Great-acting-great-jokes-and-the-peerless-poetry-of-Philip-Larkin.html

|access-date=22 February 2016

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160229080804/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3590158/Great-acting-great-jokes-and-the-peerless-poetry-of-Philip-Larkin.html

|archive-date=29 February 2016

|url-status=live

}}{{cite news

|last=Billington

|first=Michael

|date=19 February 2003 |title=Pretending To Be Me

|url=https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/feb/19/theatre.artsfeatures5

|newspaper=The Guardian

|access-date=22 February 2016

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303062601/http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/feb/19/theatre.artsfeatures5

|archive-date=3 March 2016

|url-status=live

}} An audio recording of the play, which is based on Larkin's letters, interviews, diaries and verse, was released in 2005.{{cite book|url=http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=1100&cat=48&page=3 |title=Pretending to be Me: Philip Larkin, a Portrait |author=Tom Courtenay |publisher=Time Warner (Audio books) |isbn=978-1-4055-0082-1 |year=2005 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070928142806/http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=1100&cat=48&page=3 |archive-date=28 September 2007 }}

In June 2010, Courtenay returned to the University of Hull to give a performance of a newly revised version of Pretending to Be Me called Larkin Revisited in aid of the Larkin statue appeal as part of the Larkin 25 festival.{{cite web

|url=http://www.digyorkshire.com/EventListing.aspx?Event=54932

|archive-url=https://archive.today/20130102082034/http://www.digyorkshire.com/EventListing.aspx?Event=54932

|url-status=usurped

|archive-date=2 January 2013

|title=Larkin Revisited – Tom Courtenay

|work=Dig Yorkshire

|publisher=Audiences Yorkshire

|access-date=14 July 2010

}}

In July 2003, BBC Two broadcast a play entitled Love Again—its title also that of one of Larkin's most painfully personal poems—dealing with the last thirty years of Larkin's life (though not shot anywhere near Hull). The lead role was played by Hugh Bonneville,{{cite web|url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/01_january/24/love_again.shtml |title=Hugh Bonneville plays poet Philip Larkin in the BBC TWO film Love Again |date=19 March 2003 |publisher=BBC |access-date=27 October 2009 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100116111323/http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/1_january/24/love_again.shtml |archive-date=16 January 2010 }} and in the same year Channel 4 broadcast the documentary Philip Larkin, Love and Death in Hull.{{cite news

|last=Banks-Smith

|first=Nancy

|date=7 July 2003

|title=What not to swear (Last night's TV)

|url=https://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/07/television.artsfeatures

|newspaper=The Guardian

|access-date=22 February 2016

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303061422/http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jul/07/television.artsfeatures

|archive-date=3 March 2016

|url-status=live

}}

In April 2008, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a play by Chris Harrald entitled Mr Larkin's Awkward Day, recounting the practical joke played on him in 1957 by his friend Robert Conquest, a fellow poet.{{cite news

|url=https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/apr/29/radio

|title=Mr Larkin's Awkward Day

|publisher=Guardian News and Media Limited

|work=The Guardian

|date=29 April 2008

|access-date=27 October 2009

|location=London

|first=Phil

|last=Daoust

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140219001343/http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/apr/29/radio

|archive-date=19 February 2014

|url-status=live

}}

The Philip Larkin Society is a charitable organization dedicated to preserving the memory and works of Philip Larkin. It was formed in 1995 on the tenth anniversary of Larkin's death,{{cite web|url=http://www.philiplarkin.com/index.htm |publisher=Philip Larkin Society |title=The Philip Larkin Society website Home Page |access-date=16 September 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100903160051/http://www.philiplarkin.com/index.htm |archive-date=3 September 2010 }} and achieved charity status in the United Kingdom in 2000. Anthony Thwaite, one of Larkin's literary executors, was the society's president until his death in 2021.{{cite news|url=http://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/23/anthony-thwaite-obituary|title=Anthony Thwaite obituary|date=23 April 2021|work=The Guardian|accessdate=29 November 2021}} Professor James Booth is an Honorary Vice-president and Honorary Life Member, as was Professor Eddie Dawes, the society's inaugural Chair.{{cite web|url=http://philiplarkin.com/news/our-new-honorary-vice-presidents/|title=Our new honorary vice-presidentsn|accessdate=29 November 2021}} The current Society president is Rosie Millard OBE.{{cite web|url=http://philiplarkin.com/uncategorized/our-new-president/|title=Our New Presidentn|accessdate=29 November 2021}} The Society's Chair is Graham Chesters and deputy chair is Lyn Lockwood.{{cite web|url=http://philiplarkin.com/committee/|title=Philip Larkin – COMMITTEE|accessdate=29 November 2021}}

The society carries out various activities, such as lectures, walking tours and events for Larkin and his literary contemporaries.{{cite web|url=https://literaryrambles.org/walks/uk/england/london/hull-east-yorkshire-philip-larkin-7309|title=Hull, East Yorkshire: Philip Larkin|date=25 October 2021n|accessdate=29 November 2021}} It hosted the Larkin 25 art festival from June to December 2010 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Larkin's death, [http://www.philiplarkin.com/events/larkin25.html] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120219233140/http://www.philiplarkin.com/events/larkin25.html|date=19 February 2012}} and in 2016 unveiled Larkin's memorial stone at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, which includes lines from An Arundel Tomb: "Our almost-instinct almost true / What will survive of us is love".{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-humber-38187840|title=Westminster Poets' Corner memorial for Philip Larkin|date=2 December 2016|work=BBC News|accessdate=29 November 2021}}

Memorials to Larkin in Kingston upon Hull, where he worked and wrote much of his poetry, are the Larkin Building at the University of Hull housing teaching facilities and lecture rooms and the Philip Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing which hosts a regular programme of literary events.{{cite web

|url = http://www.ihull.org/larkin/

|title = Philip Larkin Centre, University of Hull

|publisher = .hull.ac.uk

|access-date = 15 September 2010

|url-status = dead

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20111006180228/http://www.ihull.org/larkin/

|archive-date = 6 October 2011

}}

In May 2022 Larkin's childhood school, King Henry VIII School, dedicated a memorial room, called 'The Philip Larkin Room', next to the main school hall, otherwise known as Burgess Hall.{{cite news|url=http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/school-marks-link-with-poet-3170732|title=School marks link with poet|first=Coventry|last=Live|date=17 May 2002|website=CoventryLive|accessdate=1 December 2022}}

In 2010, the city marked the 25th anniversary of his death with the Larkin 25 Festival. A video was commissioned to illustrate Larkin's poem "Here", his hymn to Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire.{{cite web

|url=http://vimeo.com/9857156

|title=Here – Philip Larkin (HD)

|work=Vimeo

|quote="Here" read by Tom Courtenay and illustrated by Classlane Media

|access-date=9 August 2010

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121113071256/http://vimeo.com/9857156

|archive-date=13 November 2012

|url-status=dead

}} Forty decorated toad sculptures entitled "Larkin with Toads" were displayed in the city in tribute to Larkin's poem "Toads" on 17 July 2010.{{cite web

|url = http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/news/Weird-wonderful-toads-hop-city-streets-Larkin-25-celebrations/article-2426721-detail/article.html

|title = Weird and wonderful toads hop onto City streets for Larkin 25 celebrations

|date = 17 July 2010

|work = This is Hull and East Riding

|access-date = 17 July 2010

|url-status = dead

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20100720204846/http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/news/Weird-wonderful-toads-hop-city-streets-Larkin-25-celebrations/article-2426721-detail/article.html

|archive-date = 20 July 2010

}}

A larger-than-life-size bronze statue of Larkin by sculptor Martin Jennings was unveiled at Hull Paragon Interchange in December 2010, closing the Larkin 25 events.{{cite news

|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11890592

|title=Remembering Philip Larkin 25 years on

|last=Youngs

|first=Ian

|date=2 December 2010

|work=BBC News Online

|publisher=BBC

|access-date=7 December 2010

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101205015533/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11890592

|archive-date=5 December 2010

|url-status=live

}}{{cite web

|url = http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/news/Statue-poet-Philip-Larkin-erected-Paragon-Station/article-2493377-detail/article.html

|title = Life-size statue of Larkin to be put up at Paragon station – despite divided opinion

|date = 5 August 2010

|work = This is Hull and East Riding

|access-date = 5 August 2010

|url-status = dead

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20100806181457/http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/news/Statue-poet-Philip-Larkin-erected-Paragon-Station/article-2493377-detail/article.html

|archive-date = 6 August 2010

}}

It is inscribed, "That Whitsun I was late getting away", from the poem, The Whitsun Weddings.{{cite news

|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-10878246

|title=Council go-ahead for Larkin statue

|date=5 August 2010

|work=BBC News Humberside

|access-date=6 August 2010

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110317083323/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-10878246

|archive-date=17 March 2011

|url-status=live

}}

Funding for the £100,000 statue, designed by Martin Jennings, was raised at charity events and auctions with support from Hull City Council. The unveiling was accompanied by Nathaniel Seaman's Fanfare for Larkin, composed for the occasion. Five plaques containing Larkin's poems were added to the floor near the statue in 2011. In December 2012, a memorial bench was installed around a pillar near the statue.{{cite news

|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-20572472

|title=Philip Larkin honoured at Hull Paragon station

|date=2 December 2012

|work=BBC News

|publisher=BBC

|access-date=6 December 2012

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121205044045/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-20572472

|archive-date=5 December 2012

|url-status=live

}}

In June 2015, it was announced that Larkin would be honoured with a floor stone memorial at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The memorial was unveiled on 2 December 2016, the 31st anniversary of his death. Actor Sir Tom Courtenay and artist Grayson Perry both read from Larkin's work during the unveiling ceremony and an address was given by poet and author Blake Morrison.{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/02/philip-larkin-poets-corner-westminster-abbey|title=Philip Larkin didn’t need a place in Poets’ Corner – but he deserves it|author=Blake Morrison|date=2 December 2016|newspaper=The Guardian|access-date=2 December 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161202195114/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/02/philip-larkin-poets-corner-westminster-abbey|archive-date=2 December 2016|url-status=live}}{{cite news |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-33148295 |title=Philip Larkin to get Poets' Corner memorial |work=BBC News |publisher=BBC |date=15 June 2015 |access-date=15 June 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150617072339/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-33148295 |archive-date=17 June 2015 |url-status=live }}{{cite news |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-38187840 |title=Westminster Poets' Corner memorial for Philip Larkin |work=BBC News |publisher=BBC |date=2 December 2016 |access-date=2 December 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161202214011/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-38187840 |archive-date=2 December 2016 |url-status=live }} The memorial includes two lines quoted from his poem "An Arundel Tomb":

Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

From 5 July to 1 October 2017, as part of the Hull UK City of Culture 2017 celebrations, the Brynmor Jones Library at Hull University mounted the exhibition "Larkin: New Eyes Each Year". It featured objects from Larkin's life, as well as his personal collection of books from his last home at Newland Park, in the original shelf order in which he had arranged them.{{cite web

|url=https://www.hull2017.co.uk/whatson/events/larkin-new-eyes-year/

|title=Larkin: New Eyes Each Year

|publisher=Hull 2017 UK City of Culture

|access-date=25 July 2017

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171007220737/https://www.hull2017.co.uk/whatson/events/larkin-new-eyes-year/

|archive-date=7 October 2017

|url-status=dead

}} Also in 2017, in the Burgess district of Coventry, the pub known as The Tudor Rose was renamed The Philip Larkin.{{cite news|url=http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/whats-on/music-nightlife-news/historic-pub-renamed-honour-controversial-12985537|title=City pub renamed after poet with debatable views on sex and race|first=Katrina|last=Chilver|date=4 May 2017|website=CoventryLive|accessdate=1 December 2022}}

File:Art installation Larkin with Toads 28.jpg|Sculpture of Larkin as a toad, displayed during the Larkin 25 Festival in 2010, Kingston upon Hull

File:Philip Larkin Statue Hull.jpg|Bronze statue of Larkin by sculptor Martin Jennings, at Hull Paragon Interchange

File:Larkin plaque, Belfast - geograph.org.uk - 596930.jpg| Blue plaque at Queen's University Belfast

{{main|List of poems by Philip Larkin}}

• {{cite book

| publication-date =1945

| title =The North Ship

| publisher =The Fortune Press

| isbn =978-0-571-10503-8

}}

• {{cite book

| publication-date =1951

| title =XX Poems

| publisher =Privately Printed

}}

• {{cite book

| publication-date =1955

| title =The Less Deceived

| publisher =The Marvell Press

| isbn =978-0-900533-06-8

}}

• "Church Going"
• "Toads"
• "Maiden Name"
• "Born Yesterday" (written for the birth of Sally Amis)
• "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album"
• {{cite book

| publication-date =1964

| title =The Whitsun Weddings

| publisher =Faber and Faber

| isbn =978-0-571-09710-4

}}

• "The Whitsun Weddings"
• "An Arundel Tomb"
• "A Study of Reading Habits"
• "Home is So Sad"
• "Mr Bleaney"
• {{cite book

| publication-date =1974

| title =High Windows

| publisher =Faber and Faber

| isbn =978-0-571-11451-1

}}

• "This Be The Verse"
• "Annus Mirabilis"
• "The Explosion"
• "The Building"
• "High Windows"
• {{cite book

| editor-last=Thwaite

| editor-first=Anthony

| editor-link=Anthony Thwaite

| title=Collected Poems

| publisher=Faber and Faber

| publication-date=1988

| isbn=0-571-15386-0

}}

• "Aubade" (first published 1977)
• "Party Politics" (last published poem)
• "The Dance" (unfinished & unpublished)
• "Love Again" (unpublished)
• {{cite book

| editor-last=Thwaite

| editor-first=Anthony

| editor-link=Anthony Thwaite

| title=Collected Poems

| publisher=Faber and Faber

| publication-date=2003

| isbn=978-0-571-21654-3

}}

• The North Ship
• The Less Deceived
• The Whitsun Weddings
• High Windows
• Two appendices of all other published poems, including XX Poems
• Burnett, Archie, ed. (2012), The Complete Poems, Faber and Faber, {{ISBN|978-0-571-24006-7}}

• {{cite book

| publication-date =1946

| title =Jill

| publisher =The Fortune Press

| isbn =978-0-571-22582-8

}}

• {{cite book

| publication-date =1947

| title =A Girl in Winter

| publisher =Faber and Faber

| isbn =978-0-571-22581-1

}}

• {{cite book

| publication-date =2002

| title ="Trouble at Willow Gables" and Other Fiction 1943–1953

| publisher =Faber and Faber

| editor =James Booth

| isbn =0-571-20347-7

}}

• {{cite book

| publication-date =1985

| title =All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–1971

| publisher =Faber and Faber

| isbn =978-0-571-13476-2

}}

• {{cite book

| publication-date =1983

| title =Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982

| publisher =Faber and Faber

| isbn =978-0-571-13120-4

}}

• {{cite book

| publication-date =2001

| title =Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews 1952–1985

| publisher =Faber and Faber

| isbn =978-0-571-21614-7

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Larkin

| first =Philip

| year =1979

| publication-date =1987

| contribution =The Brynmor Jones Library 1929–1979

| editor-last =Brennan

| editor-first =Maeve

| title ='A Lifted Study-Storehouse': The Brynmor Jones Library 1929–1979, updated to 1985

| publisher =Hull University Press

| isbn =0-85958-561-1

}}

• {{cite book

| editor-last=Larkin

| editor-first=Philip

| title=The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse

| publisher=Oxford University Press

| publication-date=1973

| isbn=978-0-19-812137-4

}}

• {{cite book

| editor-last=Thwaite

| editor-first=Anthony

| editor-link=Anthony Thwaite

| title=Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985

| publisher=Faber and Faber

| publication-date=1992

| isbn=0-571-17048-X

}}

• {{cite book

| editor-last=Thwaite

| editor-first=Anthony

| editor-link=Anthony Thwaite

| title=Letters to Monica

| publisher=Faber and Faber

| publication-date=2010

| isbn=0-571-23909-9

}}{{bots|deny=Citation bot}}

{{reflist|colwidth=30em}}

{{refbegin}}

• Banville, John (2006). [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18715 Homage to Philip Larkin], The New York Review of Books, 23 February 2006.
• {{cite book

| last =Bloomfield

| first =B. C.

| publication-date =2002

| title =Philip Larkin A Bibliography 1933–1994

| publication-place =London

| publisher =British Library

| isbn =0-7123-4747-X

| year =2002

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Bowen

| first =Phil

| publication-date =2008

| title =A Gallery to Play To: The Story of the Mersey Poets

| publication-place =Liverpool

| publisher =Liverpool University Press

| isbn =1-84631-125-X

| year =2008

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Bradford

| first =Richard

| title =First Boredom Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin

| publication-place =London

| publisher =Peter Owen

| isbn =0-7206-1147-4

| year =2004

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Brennan

| first =Maeve

| publication-date =2002

| title =The Philip Larkin I Knew

| url =https://archive.org/details/philiplarkinikne0000bren

| url-access =registration

| publication-place =Manchester

| publisher =Manchester University Press

| isbn =0-7190-6275-6

| year =2002

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Chatterjee

| first =Sisir Kumar

| title =Philip Larkin: Poetry That Builds Bridges

| publication-place =New Delhi

| publisher =Atlantic Publishers

| isbn =81-269-0606-5

| year =2006

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Cooper

| first =Stephen

| publication-date =2004

| title =Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer

| publication-place =Brighton

| publisher =Sussex Academic Press

| isbn =1-84519-000-9

| year =2004

}}

• {{cite book

| editor-last=Corcoran

| editor-first=Neil

| title=The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry

| publication-place =Cambridge

| publisher=Cambridge University Press

| publication-date=2007

| isbn=0-521-87081-X

| year=2007

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Crawford

| first =Robert

| author-link =Robert Crawford (Scottish poet)

| publication-date =2000

| title =Devolving English Literature

| publication-place =Edinburgh

| publisher =Edinburgh University Press

| isbn =0-7486-1429-X

| year =2000

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Gilroy

| first =John

| date = April 2008

| title = Larkin in the Dock

| periodical =About Larkin - The Newsletter of the Philip Larkin Society

| publication-place =Hull

| issue =25

| pages =25–27

| issn =1362-542X

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Goodman

| first =Richard

| date = October 1997

| title = 'My particular talents': Philip Larkin's 42-year career as a Librarian

| periodical =About Larkin – The Newsletter of the Philip Larkin Society

| publication-place =Hull

| issue =4

| pages =4–11

| issn =1362-542X

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Hartley

| first =Jean

| publication-date =1989

| title =Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me

| publication-place =Manchester

| publisher =Carcanet Press

| isbn =0-85635-838-X

| year =1989

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Hawkes

| first =Terence

| title =Textual Practice

| publication-place =Cambridge

| publisher =Routledge

| isbn =0-415-11098-X

| year =1994

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Ingelbien

| first =Raphael

| publication-date =2002

| title =Misreading England: Poetry and Nationhood Since the Second World War

| publication-place =Amsterdam

| publisher =Rodopi

| isbn =90-420-1123-8

| year =2002

}}

• James, Clive. [http://www.clivejames.com/pieces/snakecharmers/larkin An Affair of Sanity: Philip Larkin] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110929165853/http://www.clivejames.com/pieces/snakecharmers/larkin |date=29 September 2011 }}, The Observer, 25 November 1983.
• {{cite book

| last =Johnson

| first =Matthew

| publication-date =2007

| title =Ideas of Landscape: An Introduction

| publication-place =Oxford

| publisher =Blackwell Publishing

| isbn =1-4051-0159-8

| year =2007

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Jarniewicz

| first =Jerzy

| publication-date =1994

| title =The Uses of the Commonplace in Contemporary British Poetry: Larkin, Dunn and Raine

| publication-place =Lodz

| publisher =University of Lodz Press

| isbn =83-7016-739-X

| year =1994

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Moran

| first =Eugene V

| publication-date =2002

| title =A People's History of English and American Literature

| publication-place =New York

| publisher =Nova

| isbn =1-59033-303-9

| year =2002

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Motion

| first =Andrew

| author-link =Andrew Motion

| title =Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life

| publication-place =London

| publisher =Faber and Faber

| isbn =0-571-17065-X

| year =1993

}}

• Motion, Andrew (2005). "Philip Larkin" in Bayley, John and Carey, Leo (eds). The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature: Essays, 1962–2002. W. W. Norton & Company. {{ISBN|0-393-05840-9}}.
• {{cite book

| last =Orwin

| first =James

| date = April 2008

| title = Serious Earth: Philip Larkin's American Tape (The Watershed recording)

| periodical =About Larkin – The Newsletter of the Philip Larkin Society

| publication-place =Hull

| issue =25

| pages =20–24

| issn =1362-542X

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Osborne

| first =John

| publication-date =2008

| title =Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction

| publication-place =Basingstoke

| publisher =Palgrave Macmillan

| isbn =978-1-4039-3706-3

| year =2008

}}

• Paulin, Tom (1990). "Into the Heart of Englishness," The Times Literary Supplement, July 1990, reproduced in Regan, Stephen (ed.) (1997). Philip Larkin. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 160–177.
• {{cite book

| last =Powell

| first =Neil

| publication-date =1980

| title =Carpenters of Light

| publication-place =Lanham

| publisher =Rowman & Littlefield

| isbn =0-06-495665-2

| year =1980

| url =https://archive.org/details/carpentersofligh0000powe

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Regan

| first =Stephen

| publication-date =1997

| title =Philip Larkin

| publication-place =Basingstoke

| publisher =Palgrave Macmillan

| isbn =0-312-17349-0

| year =1997

| url-access =registration

| url =https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780312173487

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Sheppard

| first =Robert

| publication-date =2005

| title =The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000

| publication-place =Liverpool

| publisher =Liverpool University Press

| isbn =0-85323-819-7

| year =2005

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Stojkovic

| first =Tijana

| publication-date =2006

| title =Unnoticed in the Casual Light of Day: Philip Larkin and the Plain Style

| publication-place =New York

| publisher =CRC Press

| isbn =0-415-97549-2

| year =2006

}}

• {{cite book

| last =Swarbrick

| first =Andrew

| publication-date =1995

| title =Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin

| publication-place =Basingstoke

| publisher =Palgrave Macmillan

| isbn =0-312-12545-3

| year =1995

}}

• {{cite book

| editor-last=Thwaite

| editor-first=Anthony

| editor-link=Anthony Thwaite

| title=Larkin at Sixty

| publication-place =London

| publisher=Faber and Faber

| publication-date=1982

| isbn=0-571-11878-X

| year=1982

}}

• {{cite book

| editor-last=Tuma

| editor-first=Keith

| title=Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry

| publication-place =New York

| publisher=Oxford University Press

| publication-date=2001

| isbn=0-19-512894-X

| year=2001

}}

• {{cite video

|people = Courtenay, Tom (author and reader)

|date = 21 April 2005

|title = Pretending to be Me: Philip Larkin, a Portrait

|medium = Audio CD

|publisher = Time Warner AudioBooks

|isbn = 1-4055-0082-4

}}

• {{cite episode

| title =Down Cemetery Road

| series =Monitor

| credits =Philip Larkin, John Betjeman, Patrick Garland (director)

| network =BBC

| station =BBC One

| location =Hull, England

| airdate =12 December 1964

| number =140

}}

• Harrald, Chris. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/schedule/2008/04/29/day/ Mr Larkin's Awkward Day] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080628164158/http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/schedule/2008/04/29/day/ |date=28 June 2008 }}, BBC Radio 4, 29 April 2008. Repeated BBC Radio 4, 25 January 2010.
• {{cite video

|people=Weeks, John (sound engineer)

|date=22 January 2009

|title=The Sunday Sessions: Philip Larkin reading his poetry

|url=http://www.faber.co.uk/work/sunday-sessions/9780571244041/

|medium=Audio CD

|publisher=Faber and Faber

|access-date=21 September 2011

|isbn=978-0-571-24404-1

|url-status=dead

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101217201715/http://faber.co.uk/work/sunday-sessions/9780571244041/

|archive-date=17 December 2010

}}

{{refend}}

{{refbegin}}

• [http://www.philiplarkin.com/ The Philip Larkin Society]. Retrieved 13 November 2009.
• {{cite web |url=http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7076 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070927220427/http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7076 |url-status=dead |archive-date=27 September 2007 |publisher=The Poetry Archive |title=Philip Larkin (1922–1985) }}
• {{cite journal| url=http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3153/the-art-of-poetry-no-30-philip-larkin| title=Philip Larkin, The Art of Poetry No. 30| date=Summer 1982| work=The Paris Review| first=Robert |last=Phillips}}, a long interview with Philip Larkin.
• [http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/L/larkin/index.html "Philip Larkin"], Channel 4 television. Retrieved 13 November 2009.
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20111006180228/http://www.ihull.org/larkin/ The Philip Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing], University of Hull. Retrieved 13 November 2009.
• Brown, Mark (2008). [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/07/photography.art "Photographer's papers reveal image-conscious Larkin"], The Guardian, 7 May 2008.
• Fletcher, Christopher (2008). [http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3889722.ece "Revealingly yours, Philip Larkin"]{{dead link|date=January 2025|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}, The Sunday Times, 11 May 2008.

{{refend}}

{{clear}}

{{Library resources box|onlinebooks=yes|by=yes|viaf=68946198|label=Philip Larkin}}

• {{commons category-inline|Philip Larkin}}
• {{wikiquote-inline}}
• {{NPG name}}
• {{UK National Archives ID}}
• Richard Lea, [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/06/unknown-philip-larkin-poem-found-shoebox "Unknown Philip Larkin poem found in shoebox"], The Guardian, 6 December 2010.
• [http://searcharchives.bl.uk/IAMS_VU2:IAMS032-000897842 Bloomfield/Larkin Papers]{{Dead link|date=November 2023 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} at the British Library
• [http://searcharchives.bl.uk/IAMS_VU2:IAMS040-002002229 Poetical Notebook of Philip Larkin]{{Dead link|date=November 2023 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} at the British Library

{{good article}}

{{Philip Larkin}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Larkin, Philip}}

Category:1922 births

Category:1985 deaths

Category:Academics of the University of Hull

Category:Academics of the University of Leicester

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Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire

Category:Deaths from esophageal cancer in England

Category:English agnostics

Category:English librarians

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Category:People educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry

Category:Writers from Coventry

Category:20th-century English poets