As someone in Dorset once remarked to me "Tommy 'Ardy? He were a miserable old bugger, weren't he?" And so was Larkin. He makes Housman and Macneice seem positively jolly; perhaps only Sylvia Plath is more gloomy. Yet the gloom is voiced with relish and zest, and there is beauty.
Favourites: “An Arundel Tomb”. “Water” and “Days”, however are sadly not here; they can be found in "Voices", vol 3, Penguin, 1968. As for the editor, I found "The Rachel Papers" extremely misogynistic. Yet I quite enjoyed "London Fields" in a hideous kind of way. As for Amis pere, can't stand any of his stuff.
When I visited Hull briefly once, I asked what all the fibreglass frogs were about. “They’re not frogs”, they replied. “They’re Larkin’s toads”.

I came across Philip Larkin in 1973 in of all places the Cleveland Public School System. I was lucky enough to have Ms Pesek as my teacher. She was rather cutting-edge in a system that was mediocre at best. It was in her class I read so many above my grade level books she provided, some probably not appropriate for the typical fourth grader. Not bad books but very good books like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novel written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One day she read us a poem about a man visiting a church who removed his cycling clips before entering the building. It was odd because the church was no longer in regular use. The man considers the visit a waste of time. That was pretty powerful stuff for a young Catholic. For some reason about a year ago, that memory came back to me. I searched the internet using the keywords from my memory and found the poem "Church Going" by Philip Larkin.

I looked for a collection at my library and went away empty handed. I ended up buying this collection selected by Martin Amis who also writes the introduction. I haven't read all of Larkin's poems, so I can't really comment on the selection, but I have read Amis and liked his writing. Amis knew Larkin and that adds a personal experience rather than just a stock biography. Larkin was friends with Kingsley Amis, Martin's father.

Larkin seems to look and sounds much like a person happy to live in a dystopia. Anything more lively would seem to crack his shell. Even when reading his poems, he has that dry, humorless, voice that captures his words so well. This is by no means saying his writing is bad but different. From my interpretation, he is to poetry what cyberpunk is to science fiction. The darker, more desperate side of poetry. Where there is joy, it is quickly countered.

In "Trees" a budding leaf, to most a sign of spring, is a green kind of grief. The leaves are born knowing they will never grow old. It's a yearly trick of the tree to look new. In "High Windows," an old man looks down on the youth in the street and imagines their paradise in a time of "the pill" and the diaphragm and the long downward slide they are heading on. Then he wonders if years ago people said the same of him when he turned his back on religion.

Larkin is also critical of money. He refers to salaried employees as "toads." "Homage to a Government," tells of bringing all the soldiers back home from there far off outposts and leaving the places they guarded for the lack of money. They are in far off places. Who really cares about them? Nothing will change at home. The statues will remain standing and the children will not know the difference. However, "All we can hope to leave them now is money. The poem "Money" closes with:

I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Larkin has the unique ability to use rhyme and meter in his work and still have it sound conversational. His writing is familiar too. He writes as a person who prefers to be isolated and alone he relates to those of us who tend to be a bit introverted and maybe a bit cynical too. This may not be the typical English pastoral poetry one reads in high school or in English Literature classes, but it is important, nonetheless. For those interested in reading Larkin, spend some time listening to him read his poems. I have found several online and listening to him read his own words gives a deeper feel to the poems and allows the reader to follow the pattern of his writing. ( )