Poems recorded more than a quarter of a century ago by Philip Larkin are to be broadcast for the first time after they were found languishing in a garage in Yorkshire.

The unmistakable dull monotone renditions of the early verses were found in the seaside town of Hornsea, near Hull, two years ago. Larkin is heard reading three poems from his first collection, The North Ship, which he self-published in 1945 while a 22-year-old librarian in Shropshire.

It had been thought that Larkin, who died of throat cancer in 1985, had never recorded this debut collection. But they were among 26 poems taped on a reel-to-reel machine in 1980 by John Weeks, a former BBC sound engineer who had met the poet while they were working at the University of Hull. Weeks recorded Larkin in a makeshift studio in his garage.

The recordings gathered dust until Weeks’s son came to catalogue the sound archive following his father’s death.

The early verses are described as lyrical sonnets more reminiscent of the young WB Yeats than Larkin’s later melancholic work.

One numbered poem begins:

So through the unripe day
you bore your head,
And the day was plucked and
tasted bitter
As if still cold among the leaves

In life, Larkin shrank from public performances and the tapes almost double the number of known recordings. They will be broadcast on Saturday on Radio 4’s The Archive Hour.

“He doubted his own voice,” said Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, and Larkin’s biographer. “He was reluctant to become a public figure.”

Larkin turned down the offer to become poet laureate in 1984 after the death of Sir John Betje-man, the incumbent. By then Larkin knew his poetry had dried up and he was seriously ill.

According to Motion, Larkin suffered from a bad stammer as a child. Although he gradually overcame it, he knew that to do this he had developed a “bush-man’s-like click”.

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