n a recent book, Early Larkin (2021), James Underwood critically examines the earlier work of Philip Larkin including the poet’s first mature work The Less Deceived (1955). Through his text-based reading of Larkin’s work, Underwood re-discovers a nuanced assembling of “a recognisably Larkinesque aesthetic”; colloquial, mundane, dreary, reflective and lugubrious. Admittedly, a poet who called his childhood “unspent” presents a world of shattered illusions – in which marriage, love and family are crutches chronically inadequate for human existence.

August 9, 2022, marked Larkin’s 100th birth anniversary. Larkin’s reputation as a man may have suffered from certain divisiveness of opinion after the publication of Selected Letters (1999) edited by his lifelong friend and poet, Anthony Thwaite – to many of Larkin’s detractors, he was a racial bigot, misogynist and a two-timer in his relations with women. However, his place among the 20th Century poets is intact. In fact with each decade, after he died in 1985, his fame has burgeoned though partially corroded by controversy.

Against such unshakable faith in the absurdity of life, the moments of negation outnumber moments of affirmation in Larkin. Wendy Cope, the British poet, writing in The Telegraph (Why I won’t stop reading Philip Larkin: July 30, 2022) lifts the scandalous weight from Larkin’s persona reminding critics of their lopsided versions of his work privileging biography, rather captiously, over his work. “Larkin was a sad, unkind man with unacceptable views – but 100 years after his birth, his poetry can still move me to tears”, she writes. Therefore, Larkin’s relevance as a poet, despite critics’ propensity for biographicalism, has not waned out.

What also distinguishes Larkin from other poets is his love for his profession as a librarian, but to many students, he was “the grumpy and stringent university librarian”. Argentinian writer Borges too was a librarian. Borges is famously reported as once having said: “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library”. Larkin’s professional doggedness in maintaining a library is evident in the fact that he would introduce himself as a librarian because according to him it paid better than a poet. While Borges’s concept of a library, a space, is transcendental, Larkin’s is earthy. Larkin spent more than thirty years as a librarian at the University of Hull – a place he described as a “hole”. In a letter to his friend DJ Enright, the poet wailed: “I’m settling down in Hull all right. Every day I sink a little further.” This mental anguish, emanating from the landscape, is wrapped in tongue-in-cheek irony in the poem, Library Ode:

New eyes each year

Find old books here,

And new books, too,

Old eyes renew;

So youth and age

Like ink and page

In this house join,

Minting new coin.

This poetic situation is augmented by Larkin’s own “interest in everything outside himself”, a phrase used in an early short story, The Eagles Are Gone. Self-effacement, self-reproach, self-caricature; ultimately the self-reflective irony is Larkin’s venture to distinguish the demands of life on art. In one of his most quoted poems, This Be The Verse, the poet advocates against marriage and advises succeeding generations “do not get yourself kids.” In real life, after the death of his father, a Nazi sympathiser, he took care of his mother and wrote to her twice a week. The wedge between art and life is unbridgeable and yet life is also a litmus test of art.

Larkin, the cynical, a porn addict and an atypical lothario, does not dovetail with Larkin the poet, whose passion for quotidian is personified by lawn mowers, factory workers, misogamists, pesky academics, suburban dawdlers and agnostics. To this array of life, England was Larkin’s impetus. So, the ‘real Larkin’ is being endlessly re-invented for the range and attention he pays to the inner lives of other people; his parents, literary companions, the novelist Kingsley Amis, and his muse/ mistress Monica Jones.

What clouds up readers from former colonies is Larkin’s hatred of immigrants and labour movements. Ideologically attached to Thatcherite conservatism, Larkin espoused the politics of the Right and was afraid of the Labour Party taking control of Britain. Moreover, he hardly left England, did not bother about foreign literature, and top of all, his letters revealed his racist xenophobia against Asian and black communities. Allow me to be a little anecdotal at this point. In 2015, I visited Queens University, Belfast, to attend a conference, where I cherished two attractions: Seamus Heaney Centre of Poetry and the Library where Larkin worked as an assistant librarian. However, when I was given Larkin to teach to undergraduates (Department of English, University of Punjab) I demurred from telling students that Larkin was an anti-immigrant and that he loathed outsiders: “the Pakistanis and the Caribbean grow on me like germs in tubes.” Correspondingly, while teaching Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich, I loop in Urdu women poets such as Kishwar Naheed and Fahmida Riaz for their feminist upheavals. Heaney and Hughes also go along despite being antithetical adorers of nature. Only, Larkin is a misfit.

Understandably the Movement, a small bunch of poets of the 1960s, of which Larkin was a part, departed from the lyrical romanticism of Dylan Thomas, though Larkin was influenced by Yeats (The Last Romantic) and Thomas Hardy. In the end, what rescued me from the discomfiture of relaying Larkin’s racist realities to my students is Helen Vendler’s Howard Lecture, How To Teach Poetry, in which she emphasises the “life situation out of which the poem is written” thus foremost is the principle of pleasure. Additionally, Larkin’s Jazz: Essays and Reviews 1940-84 casts him in a deferential light identifying with the African-American genre of music and showing empathy with the plight of the Black people.

By that token, Larkin’s poetry fulfills the desiderata of the generation called the swinging sixties emblematised by the pill, Beatles and Rolls Royce. The sixties witnessed economic duress, provincial crudeness, shabby living conditions and grumbling working class, but it also brought technology-based convenience. The poem Here from The Whitsun Weddings (1964) is about a train journey to Hull, along with ‘industrial shadows’ as the poet witnesses consumers buying electric mixers, toasters but then suddenly the landscape meets ‘an unfenced existence’ a bleak humdrum suburban life and the world beyond it, undivided by commercial interests. Larkin does not withdraw into spiritual cloisters. Instead, he hits hard at naked materialism. The Trees from Collected Poems (1993) is another poem bearing Larkin’s trademark sadness as the poet watches trees “coming into leaf” but their “greenness is a grief”; the alliterative analogy enhances the feeling of impending death and extinction. Bodily disorders, disease and ageing are Larkin’s conceptual metaphors for annihilation. Concomitantly, marriage, faith and love are mere traps. Therefore, reading Larkin one cannot miss the philosophical grain of Arthur Schopenhauer and Soren Kierkegaard.

The reason Larkin was a private man, cultivated unsociability and refused the position of poet-laureate is that he despised sociability like Schopenhauer who considered sociability a dangerous vulgarity, a rascality. Similarly, Larkin’s personae are hit by angst or anxiety a feeling which in Kierkegaard is rooted in the original sin, but Larkin mows down the roots of faith bragging sardonically that “man hands on misery to man” and “Life is first boredom, then fear”.

It is because of this casual dismissal of life that James Booth, Larkin’s colleague, and biographer called Larkin “England’s miserable genius”. In Philip Larkin: Life, Love, and Art (2014) Booth straddles cautiously between Larkin’s biography and his art, his solitude, and a parsimonious public appearance, a poet with “the wish to be alone”. But Andrew Motion, a distinguished literary executioner discovered a grumpy and grouchy Larkin in Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1994), though he called him the “hermit of Hull”. It is James Booth who showed the compassionate side of Larkin extracting his fraught love life in missives to his longtime muse Monica Jones, whom he addressed as ‘Bun’ let alone his liaisons with other women. There are so many walls around Larkin’s persona that one can be demolished only at the cost of erecting another; a lover, a bachelor and a curmudgeon exemplified in the poem Love Again asking “why it never worked for me?” Life is inadequate for an artist, says Freud. Larkin lived out this reality.

The writer is a poet based in Lahore. His first collection of poems Lahore,  I Am Coming (2017) was published by Punjab University Press