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He was, it is now generally agreed, not a very nice man. “What will survive of us is love,” he wrote, and yet to his long-time companion, Monica Jones, he was more hesitant. “I feel all too painfully how inadequately I treat you,” he wrote to her in 1955. “I see quite clearly your worth and niceness to me: I see also how unlikely I am to find anyone more fitted for me . . . it’s only a blend of relentless selfishness and dropsical romanticism that prevents me facing the fact.” In these prurient times his penchant for queasy schoolgirl erotica has become, perhaps, too well known; a solemn reissue of some “naughty” juvenilia, Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions, can’t be said to have burnished his image.

And yet the reputation of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) rests secure as the quiet modern genius of English letters. His Collected Poems is a relatively slender book, yet it is almost relentlessly full of wonders: Toads, Mr Bleaney, Talking in Bed, This Be the Verse, High Windows, Aubade, An Arundel Tomb. Larkin published at what would today be considered a glacial pace: his first collection, The North Ship, appeared in 1945, his second, The Less Deceived, ten years later. The Whitsun Weddings came in 1964, High Windows after another decade; and that was the end of that — though the Collected, edited by Anthony Thwaite, is enriched by many poems that never made it through the poet’s own rigorous filter. It is, of course, worth noting that Larkin’s original ambition was as a novelist: Jill and A Girl in Winter were both published just after the war.

It’s impossible to capture in a sentence or two what makes a writer’s work lasting. Is it surprising that a poet has come top in our rankings? I don’t think so — poetry’s compact power gives it an endurance rarely found in other forms. Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, Larkin’s biographer and (along with Thwaite) one of his literary executors, remarks: “Larkin’s poems are brilliantly good at capturing the big things in life — love and its failing, youth and its fading; age and then the only end of age — in language which is deeply familiar yet marvellously condensed and memorable. He always speaks from the heart to the heart.” The deep familiarity seems, sometimes, shockingly offhand (famously, of course: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”) and yet it is allied with a confident, metrical elegance that allows the work to exist in both the contemporary and the eternal world, a near-impossible trick.

Not that the poet himself had any delusions of grandeur. Anthony Thwaite recalls an interview that Larkin gave to John Haffenden towards the end of his life; in it he made clear that the good old days of real poetry were long gone. “If I seem good it’s because everyone else is so bad. Well, almost everyone. Well, anyway . . .” He didn’t have much time for many of his contemporaries (“Ted Hughes tomorrah — Sodom and Gomorrah”), and an early friendship with Kingsley Amis was spoilt when the latter hit the literary big time: “It’s not his success I mind so much as his immunity from worry and hard work, though I mind his success as well.”

In the end, however, all this distracts from the work that stands clear and clean. We care too much for personal detail now; it’s fortunate we don’t know a great deal about how Shakespeare behaved. Larkin’s work will stand as the near-perfect expression of humankind’s balancing act between the life that drags us down and the love — whether of person, place, or time — that exalts us. My favourite poem — though it’s nearly impossible to choose — is probably the simple, 12 lines of The Trees with its hushed, expectant ending:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

One to read: The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

More about Philip Larkin

Read his obituary, printed in the Times on December 3, 1985

David Baddiel asks why is Philip Larkin most novelists' favourite poet?

News: Larkin's tomboy first love is revealed in lost sonnet

Listen to Larkin reading his poems on The Poetry Archive

The Philip Larkin Society website

See the full top 50 list here

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