Philip Larkin (Forerunners)

Thanks to Daniel Paul Marshall for selecting the nine poems below from Philip Larkin, as well as for the following comments. Be sure to check out his blog for his own poetry, essays and photography, as well as another piece on Larkin.

Larkin was a poet I knew more about than I had read. In university I’d read quite a number of essays on him, thanks to my access to JSTOR and flicked through the The Whitsun Weddings in the library. But I was more interested in him as a character. I’d seen Love & Death in Hull, an early documentary, which had impressed me & I highly recommend. His dower, austere gloom, a rain cloud following him about wherever he traipsed, his laconic, grey speech – his whole demeanour like a leaky tap. 

It wasn’t until one of my funerary visits back to England a couple of years…