Philip Larkin

About the Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jilland A Girl in Winterand High Windowscalled him “the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket”–Larkin himself said that deprivation for him was “what daffodils were for Wordsworth”. Influenced by W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Hardy, his poems are highly structured but flexible verse forms. They were described by Jean Hartley, the ex-wife of Larkin’s publisher George Hartley (the Marvell Press), as a “piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent”. Anthologist Keith Tuma writes that there is more to Larkin’s work than its reputation for dour pessimism suggests.

Larkin’s public persona was that of the no-nonsense, solitary Englishman who disliked fame and had no patience for the trappings of the public literary life. The posthumous publication by Anthony Thwaite in 1992 of his letters triggered controversy about his personal life and political views, described by John Banville as hair-raising but also in places hilarious. Lisa Jardine called him a “casual, habitual racist, and an easy misogynist”, but the academic John Osborne argued in 2008 that “the worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment”. Despite the controversy, Larkin was chosen in a 2003 Poetry Book Society survey, almost two decades after his death, as Britain’s best-loved poet of the previous 50 years, and in 2008 The Times named him Britain’s greatest post-war writer.

In 1973 a Coventry Evening Telegraph reviewer referred to Larkin as “the bard of Coventry”, but in 2010, 25 years after his death, it was Larkin’s adopted home city, Kingston upon Hull, that commemorated him with the Larkin 25 Festival, which culminated in the unveiling of a statue of Larkin by Martin Jennings on 2 December 2010, the 25th anniversary of his death. On 2 December 2016, the 31st anniversary of his death, a floor stone memorial for Larkin was unveiled at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.