THE COMPLETE POEMS OF PHILIP LARKIN PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Archie Burnett,Philip Larkin | 768 pages | 04 Sep 2014 | FABER & FABER | 9780571240074 | English | London, United Kingdom 10 of the Best Philip Larkin Poems Poet Lovers Must Read However, we must settle down, here at the back of the class, and grant that The Complete Poems is an almost fanatically painstaking and altogether admirable piece of work. The publishers, though betraying a hint of desperation in their efforts to make the volume seem attractive to the common poetry reader — is there such a creature? Larkin had such an acute, anarchic and bleak sense of humour, or of the comic, at least — the comical and the humorous not being always synonymous — that we might be forgiven for taking him at his own face value. Although he produced some of the most delicately beautiful works of art of the 20th century, it amused him to present himself to the world as a cross between Colonel Blimp and The Archers ' Walter Gabriel of old, and to adopt in his public utterances the baleful tones of an apoplectic stockbroker complaining about immigrants on the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. Self-depreciation was not second but first nature to him. Here he is in his rueful but not unfond Introduction to the Faber reissue of his first collection, The North Ship :. Looking back, I find in the poems not one abandoned self but several — the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the only alternative to "old-fashioned" poetry; the undergraduate, whose work a friend affably characterised as "Dylan Thomas, but you've a sentimentality that's all your own"; and the immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls' school. That "local girls' school" is a quintessential Larkin detail, an interjection from his " Brunette Coleman " persona. Yeats was one of Larkin's earliest and most compelling exemplars, thrust to his attention in a talk at Oxford by the poet Vernon Watkins — "impassioned and imperative, he swamped us with Yeats" — yet many other voices twitter in the backgrounds of his poems, early and late. But the living room is ruby: there upon Cushions from Harrods, strewn in tumbled heaps Around the floor, smelling of smoke and wine, Rosemary sits. Her hands are clasped. She weeps. And there are many other revelations. Indeed, the volume overall is one vast revelation. Page-counting is always a vulgar and dispiriting exercise, but in this case the results are truly impressive. The book is divided roughly in half, into two large sections, "The Poems" and "Commentary", followed by a couple of brief appendices, the first devoted to Larkin's early collections that he made in 11 typescript booklets, the second to dates of composition. Of the odd pages of text, a mere 90 accommodate the four volumes that Larkin published when he was alive — The North Ship , The Less Deceived , The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows — while nearly are given to poems published but not collected, poems not published, and undated or approximately dated poems. Grabbed this book off the floor of my husband workspace, the "new releases" section near the pool table, which is ususally off limits to wives, children and pets. My first thought: "What is Stephen Tobolowsky doing on the cover of a poetry collection? IMAGINE my surprise to discover Philip Larkin, and read "This be the verse" and other take-no-prisoners p Grabbed this book off the floor of my husband workspace, the "new releases" section near the pool table, which is ususally off limits to wives, children and pets. But wait, I'm still reading. Still reading. Heaven help me I read every single poem, some more than twice. Philip Larkin, a man of few words, and very few published poems. High Windows is always my favorite poem, it's even more amazing if you read it out loud. What a king of words, a beautiful cynic. Jul 10, R. I've known Larkin's work since I was at school fifty years ago. For me he's one of the triumvirate, along with Eliot and Auden--the great English language poets of the twentieth century. If you love Larkin's poetry this is an invaluable collection. It includes all of his poetry, that published and that not published but contained in workbooks. What's most valuable is the commentary on each poem. They note not only the judgments and ideas of critics but also what Larkin himself wrote to friends and other writers about what he tried to do. The editor, Archie Burnett, also points out instances when Larkin, through written comment to others or notes scrawled across the pages of a wo If you love Larkin's poetry this is an invaluable collection. The editor, Archie Burnett, also points out instances when Larkin, through written comment to others or notes scrawled across the pages of a workbook, expressed his own sense of a poem's worth. The great and the minor are here without any particular arrangement. On p the great poem "Aubade" is preceded by an untitled limerick. The published work is followed by the more uneven and unpublished poems Larkin kept in his workbooks. The comments on these poems are shorter and less helpful because they're just coming to light. Larkin freely expresses his own disappointment with many of them. And the reader can often see why they were left in the workbooks rather than published. Mar 14, Mizrob A. Here are two of my favorite poems: Aubade 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. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse — The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused — nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel , not seeing That this is what we fear — no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence, Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new — Cleaned, or restored? The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, Reflect the place was not worth stopping for. Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, When churches fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places? Or, after dark, will dubious women come To make their children touch a particular stone; Pick simples for a cancer; or on some Advised night see walking a dead one? Power of some sort or other will go on In games, in riddles, seemingly at random; But superstition, like belief, must die, And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky, A shape less recognisable each week, A purpose more obscure. I wonder who Will be the last, the very last, to seek This place for what it was; one of the crew That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were? Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique, Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh? 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 which was built This special shell? And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round.