Larkin can at times be mordantly humorous. In “If My Darling” he speculates about what his girl might think if she could view the vile contents of his mind (“monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles/ Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate”), in “Toad” he compares his day-job to an intrusive amphibian (“why should I let the toad work squat on my life?), and in “I Remember, I Remember,” he excuses Coventry, the town he lived in for the painfully uneventful first eighteen years of his life, from any specific responsibility (“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”) His ponderances on the fate of churches when the religion they were built to serve is gone remind of Nietzsche’s madman, who claimed that cathedrals were now only graves and sepulchres for the dead God. Here Larkin’s cynicism about the way in which our culture is headed is evident, yet paradoxically he is a product of that culture.

Much that is admirable in the best of [Larkin’s] work is felt [in Collected Poems]: firmness and delicacy of cadence, a definite geography, a mutually fortifying congruence between what the language means to say and what it musically embodies,” asserted Seamus Heaneyin the Observer.The collection contains Larkin’s six previous volumes of poetry as well as 83 of his unpublished poems gleaned from notebooks and homemade booklets. The earliest poems (which reflect the style and social concerns of W.H. Auden) date from his schooldays and the latest close to his death. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Books, Alan Shapiropointed out, “Reading the work in total, we can see how Larkin, early and late, is a poet of great and complex feeling.” Larkin “[endowed] the most commonplace objects and occasions with a chilling poignancy, [measuring] daily life with all its tedium and narrowness against the possibilities of feeling,” adds Shapiro. These are intricate formalist poems, concerned for the larger part with mortality and thwarted desires. The excellent 'Wires', while not being the most generally admired of the collection (that accolade belongs to its centrepiece, 'Church Going'), gives a good idea of the overall tone of defeat:My favorite poem in this collection, I think, is the seemingly slight lyric "Coming." Larkin is the kind of poet who bares his soul not directly, but indirectly, in ostensibly offhand remarks and sidelong glances. Rather than straightforwardly asserting, "Childhood, to me, is a forgotten boredom," he starts a sentence in this way: "I, whose childhood is a forgotten boredom,..." The effect is all the more piercing: we, the readers, are so blindsided that we swallow Larkin's bombshell of a confession whole. We think, "How refreshing it is to hear a post-Wordsworth poet say that childhood to him is a forgotten boredom!" And this is why the ending of the poem works as well as it does: it startles us to discover that this poet, who found his childhood to be boring and forgettable, is nevertheless able to describe childhood's emotions with such heartfelt and unadorned precision. (In fact, the poem's ending startles us in exactly the same way that springtime startles the poem's speaker; the poem enacts what it is describing.) Bradford, Richard. First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 2005. There is also in these early poems a vagueness in the description of the phenomenal world. Perhaps that generality, that vagueness, could be explained as the result of the Yeatsian influence, but it is also a tendency of Larkin’s later work. One often has the impression that a scene, particularly a human scene, is typical rather than specific. Those strengths of craftsmanship and technical skill in Larkin’s mature works received almost universal approval from literary critics. London Sunday Timescorrespondent Ian Hamilton wrote: “Supremely among recent poets, [Larkin] was able to accommodate a talking voice to the requirements of strict metres and tight rhymes, and he had a faultless ear for the possibilities of the iambic line.” David Timms expressed a similar view in his book entitled Philip Larkin.Technically, notes Timms, Larkin was “an extraordinarily various and accomplished poet, a poet who [used] the devices of metre and rhyme for specific effects… His language is never flat, unless he intends it to be so for a particular reason, and his diction is never stereotyped. He [was] always ready… to reach across accepted literary boundaries for a word that will precisely express what he intends.” As King explains, Larkin’s best poems “are rooted in actual experiences and convey a sense of place and situation, people and events, which gives an authenticity to the thoughts that are then usually raised by the poet’s observation of the scene… Joined with this strength of careful social observation is a control over tone changes and the expression of developing feelings even within a single poem… which is the product of great craftsmanship. To these virtues must be added the fact that in all the poems there is a lucidity of language which invites understanding even when the ideas expressed are paradoxical or complex.” New Leadercontributor Pearl K. Bell concludes that Larkin’s poetry “fits with unresisting precision into traditional structures… filling them with the melancholy truth of things in the shrunken, vulgarized and parochial England of the 1970s.” This was a post-war Britain that had lost its Empire, so Larkin’s The Less Deceived almost reflected a sense of living in an isolated motherland. Indeed, Philip Larkin was a man ambling through life with a ponderous glare, capturing the foibles of modern life through a discerning lens and an overwhelming sense that one’s senses were diminishing. “Monkey-brown, fish-grey, a string of infected circles,” he describes the inside of his mind in If My Darling, “Loitering like bullies, about to coagulate.”

Has Michael orchestrated Roisin’s death to gain his freedom? Was he jealous of her literary fame? Is that too obvious? (Has he not heard of divorce? Is that why we are in Ireland?) Who has taken against Ophelia and why? Apart from the fact that she is called Ophelia, which is not her fault. Miscellaneous: All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961-1968, 1970; Required Writings: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982, 1984. Arguably Larkin’s most seminal poetic work, The Less Deceived was a collection of 29 poems released in 1955 which marked a sea change in his evolution towards becoming the literary colossus he is regarded today. Belonging to a (then) new generation of Angry Young Man writers, Larkin established his own unique voice—cynical yet lyrical, pessimistic yet profound—with an almost effortlessly ingenious ability to reflect the times he was living in.

The early work of an important poet always has a potential interest, since it is likely to contain anticipations of his later, finer poems; in Larkin's case, however, this interest is limited because of the sharp break in his writing after The North Ship. Monica Jones photographed by Philip Larkin on the Isle of Mull, Scotland, 1971. Photograph: Philip Larkin archive His irony, in this poem as in so many, is used defensively; he wards off criticism by beating everyone to the punch. Irony is in some respects safer than laying oneself open for inspection. In many of his finest poems, however, he drops his guard and allows himself to think seriously about serious subjects. The foremost example in The Less Deceived is “Church Going.” The title turns out to be marvelously ambiguous, appearing at first blush to be a mere reference to attending church, but then becoming, as the poem progresses, an elliptical, punning reference to churches going out of fashion. Philip Larkin (1922–1985) also published other poems. They, along with the contents of the four published collections, are included in the 2003 edition of his Collected Poems in two appendices. The previous 1988 edition contains everything that appears in the 2003 edition and additionally includes all the known mature poems that he did not publish during his lifetime, plus an appendix of early work. To help differentiate between these published and unpublished poems in our table all poems that appear in the 2003 edition's appendices are listed as Collected Poems 2003; of course, they also appear in the 1988 volume. If Rudyard Kipling’s ( 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) is the poetry of empire, then Philip Larkin’s is the poetry of the aftermath of empire. Having lived through the divestiture of England’s various colonial holdings, the economic impact of empire building having finally come home, together with the ultimate travesty of imperial pretensions and the nightmare of Nazi and Soviet colonization in Europe, Larkin was wary of the expansiveness, the acquisitiveness, and the grandeur implicit in the imperial mentality. Many features of his poetry can be traced to that wariness: from the skepticism and irony, to the colloquial diction, to the formal precision of his poems.

The birdsong makes him feel ‘like a child/ Who comes on a scene/ Of adult reconciling/ And can understand nothing/ But the unusual laughter/ And starts to be happy.’Wait! I almost forgot the best bit, apart from Scanlan’s flawless evocation of the charming creep who represents Ophelia’s first exposure to a so-far-ineradicable toxic species that she will find lining her path through life, even if she is never so susceptible to it again. Anyway, yes, Paul Mescal is in it! The Deceived was filmed just after Normal People, but before it aired, so he has a little less to do here than you might expect. He plays Sean, the village builder and volunteer firefighter who finds Roisin’s body and then takes a shine to Michael’s new house guest, and does it as credibly and creditably as you would presume. His first collection (The North Ship) seems to me more ‘romantic’, but also more prosaic. The Less Deceived then seems to find Larkin a little more worldly, bitter, and rejected (though not always), but it’s entirely more interesting, beautiful, and sharp as a result. The Whitsun Weddings continues on this trajectory and is similarly excellent. In this course, Professor Seamus Perry (University of Oxford) explores Philip Larkin's 1955 collection of poetry, The Less Deceived. After an introduction to the collection as a whole (including a discussion of the origins of the title 'The Less Deceived' itself), each module discusses two or three poems in the collection that are linked by a common theme. In the second module, for example, we think about the influence of Thomas Hardy on the collection, looking in particular at the poems 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album' and 'Next, Please'. Other themes discussed include: time, youth and memory (looking at the poems 'Skin', 'Triple Time' and 'Maiden Name'), negativity and nothingness ('I Remember, I Remember', 'Absences'), the ordinary and the commonplace ('Born Yesterday', 'Toads', 'Poetry of Departures'), escape, solitude, and oblivion ('Age', 'Wants', 'Coming'), the artist and aestheticism ('Reasons for Attendance'), religion and the church ('Church Going'), and animals ('Myxomatosis', 'Wires', 'At Grass'). In the tenth and final module, we think about the arrangement of the collection as a whole, which (as we shall see) was carefully considered by Larkin. These two poems present Larkin’s typically ironic approach to the literary tradition. “The Mower” is a highly unconventional garden song. Although its title recalls Andrew Marvell’s poems “The Garden” and “The Mower, Against Gardens,” it shares none of their pastoral innocence or coyness. It finds death, not life, in the world of nature. Similarly, he subverts the traditional use of the aubade form to discuss not the coming day but also a coming night. In both cases, he undermines traditionally upbeat forms. Yet these poems also point to the playfulness of which Larkin was capable even in his bleak est moments, finding amusement in poems of abject despair. That may prove to be his great gift, the ability to face darkness fully, to take it in, and still to laugh, to be ironic even about last things. Again, that constant strain of alienation insinuates its way into poem after poem. Throughout The Whitsun Weddings, the poet feels himself cut off from his fellow humans, often struggling to retrieve a spirit of community with them, sometimes simply wondering why it is so. The volume, while it represents little change from its predecessor, renders a picture of a man in middle age who feels life passing him by, and who sees more and more clearly the inevitable. Settings are close, small; lives are petty, insignificant; society is filled with graffiti and pollution. In “The Importance of Elsewhere,” he finds comfort in being a foreigner in Ireland, since at least he can explain his estrangement from his fellow inhabitants there. In England, ostensibly at home, he has no such excuse. High Windows

Lines 45-52: “Or will he be my representative, / Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt / Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground / Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt / So long and equably what since is found / Only in separation—marriage, and birth, / And death, and thoughts of these—for whom was built / This special shell?” Larkin wanted to be happy, but was wary because he believed happiness would prove false and fade away. So he adopted a stance of cynical realism, at times even seeming to take a kind of perverse pleasure in melancholy.

Lines 36-37: “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky, / A shape less recognizable each week,”