The Complete Poems

by Larkin, Philip; Burnett, Archie

• ISBN13: 9780374126964
• ISBN10: 0374126968
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-27
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

The complete poems of the most beloved British poet of his generation This entirely new edition brings together all of Philip Larkin's poems. In addition to those that appear in Collected Poems (1988) and Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), some unpublished pieces from Larkin's typescripts and workbooks are included, as well as verseby turns scurrilous, satirical, affectionate, and sentimentalthat had been tucked away in his letters. For the first time, Larkin's poems are given a comprehensive commentary. This draws critically upon, and substantially extends, the accumulated scholarship on Larkin, and covers closely relevant historical contexts, persons and places, allusions and echoes, and linguistic usage. Prominence is given to the poet's comments on his own poems, which often outline the circumstances that gave rise to a poem or state what he was trying to achieve. Larkin often played down his literariness, but his poetry enrichingly alludes to and echoes the writings of many others; Archie Burnett's commentary establishes him as a more complex and more literary poet than many readers have suspected.

Author Biography

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) grew up in Coventry, England. He was the best-loved poet of his generation and the recipient of innumerable honors, including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Archie Burnett is co-director of the Editorial Institute and professor of English at Boston University. He has edited the Oxford editions of The Poems of A. E. Housman and The Letters of A. E. Housman.

 

Table of Contents

“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