Collected Poems

Description

This edition of Larkin's poems presents his four published books "The North Ship", "The Less Deceived", "The Whitsun Weddings" and "High Windows" in their original sequence. The text also includes an appendix of poems that Larkin published in other places, from his juvenilia to his final years. Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this collection of poems returns readers to the book Larkin might have intended if he had lived.

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry in 1922 and was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John's College, Oxford. As well as his volumes of poems, which include The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, he wrote two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, and two books of collected journalism: All What Jazz: A Record Library, and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. He worked as a librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985. He was the best-loved poet of his generation, and the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and the WHSmith Award.

"More often than any other English poet since the war, Larkin gave us lines that it is unlikely we'll be able to forget." --Ian Hamilton, "The Times "(London) "Larkin is resolute, forthright, witty, and gloomy. This is the man who famously said that deprivation was for him what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Yet surely the results of this life, in the shape of his poems, are gifts, not deprivations." --Donald Hall, "The New Criterion"