THIS EDITION AND PREVIOUS EDITIONS

This edition includes all of Larkin’s poems whose texts are accessible.1 In all but a few cases, the poems were completed by Larkin, or, viewed in their context, are self-contained. By this latter criterion, verses from letters, mainly short, and by turns sentimental, affectionate, satirical and scurrilous, are included.2 These were omitted from Philip Larkin: Collected Poems (1988) ‘a little regretfully’ (p. xxi) by the editor, Anthony Thwaite, who in any case printed many of them in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985 (1992), where they could be seen in context. In the present edition, in order to present texts from letters as verse, lineation and punctuation have sometimes been regularised. Some unfinished poems preserved in typescript by the poet are also included, as in Collected Poems (1988). Typescripts were made by him subsequent to drafting in his workbooks, and, though he sometimes altered their wording by hand, they represent a substantiated stage of composition.3 A number of these have not been published before. Excluded, however, are mere scraps of verse such as those he mentions in early letters to James Sutton as having flitted into his head as a possible poem or (more usually) part of one. Some pieces from the workbooks that contain no uncancelled alternative readings and may be complete are incorporated, but not fragments, or drafts with uncancelled alternative readings.4

In Collected Poems (1988), Anthony Thwaite announced that he had enlarged the poetic corpus by printing for the first time sixty-one poems dating from 1946 to 1983, and another twenty-two from 1938 to 1945.5 In Philip Larkin: Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), A. T. Tolley added many more:

Almost all the poems that Larkin completed after 1950 were published by him; and they were included in the original Collected Poems. However, while Larkin completed about a hundred and sixty poems between 1950 and his death in 1985, he wrote over two hundred and fifty poems between 1938 and 1946.6

Why, then, given the existence of Collected Poems and Tolley’s volume, a new edition? An accurate text is, and always must be, the chief justification. Collected Poems (1988) contains a scattering of errors, some of which were subsequently corrected.7 Tolley’s edition is another matter altogether: its text of the poems contains 72 errors of wording, 47 of punctuation, 8 of letter-case, 5 of word-division, 4 of font and 3 of format.8 (For details see the notes in the commentary of the present edition on the texts of individual poems.) No review picked up on this, but that is because reviewers on the whole do not have time, or take time, to investigate the sources of the texts: this is one reason why editors must bear large responsibilities. Some of the other shortcomings of the volume involve inconsistent editorial practice: sometimes clear errors (often the result of Larkin’s typing) are cumbersomely reproduced, with ‘[sic]’ (or sometimes ‘[sic]’) inserted intrusively in the main body of the text of the poems; but at other times errors go uncorrected, or are corrected silently.9 In the present edition, Larkin’s errors in the texts of poems are identified in the notes, and corrected. Minor errors in letters are corrected silently.

In the case of poems printed in Collected Poems (1988), Tolley routinely proves an uncritical follower of the text, dates and bibliographical information supplied. But when there are errors, it serves the interests of neither poet nor reader to reproduce them. In the present edition, the primary sources have been examined independently with a view to correcting errors of any kind.

Bibliographical information on the sources of the texts is given in more detail than in previous editions. The record of sources in Collected Poems (1988) and Tolley (2005) is often unhelpfully rudimentary (as in ‘TS’), or lacking altogether. When archives are large, or when more than one version of a text exists, it is necessary to specify sources explicitly.10 Also given is an approximate indication of the extent of drafts in Larkin’s eight workbooks, in order to convey some sense of what the process of composition entailed. (Famous poems like Church Going and The Whitsun Weddings, for instance, did not come easily.11) ‘Nine pages of drafts’ should not be taken to mean that drafts may be found on nine pages, but rather that the drafts amount in bulk to nine workbook pages.

Dates are supplied for the various versions of poems as they evolved. One advantage of doing this is that the process of composition is charted more faithfully than in an overall chronological arrangement based on a single date for each poem. Larkin wrote dates throughout his workbooks, and this makes it possible to be precise about the points at which, or between which, drafting of a poem began and ended. It was his practice to type up a poem as soon as drafting in the workbooks had been completed, and though he sometimes made subsequent alterations by hand,12 the date of the typescript can usually be calculated from the point when composition in the workbook ceased. Evidence outside the workbooks for dates comes from typescript collections of early poems that Larkin made, from correspondence, from independent witnesses and from publications.

In Collected Poems (1988), it was the editor’s policy to give the completion date for each poem, wherever possible.13 However, the phrase ‘completion date’ is ambiguous: it turns out to mean the date by which all of the poem is represented in some form – a complete draft; not, as one might surmise, the date on which Larkin stopped working on the poem. This often results in a misleading account of the workbook evidence alone. A ‘completion date’ of 12 October 1944 is given for Night-Music (poem XI in TNS) in both editions of Collected Poems and in Tolley’s edition of Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), and one of the drafts in Workbook 1 does indeed bear the date ‘12. x. 44’. But the drafts, beginning after ‘8. x. 44’, continue substantially after 12 October 1944 and before the next date in the workbook, 23 October 1944. The drafts fall, therefore, between 8 and 23 October 1944, the latter being the date by which the poet stopped drafting the poem in the workbook. The completion date for Reasons for Attendance is given as 30 December 1953 in Collected Poems (1988), 80. But the complete draft dated ‘30 xii 53’ is preceded by another draft, complete inasmuch as all of the poem is represented in it, and it is dated ‘29 xii 53’. The completion date of 16 January 1951 given in Collected Poems (1988), 52, for Next, Please, is corrected in Collected Poems (2003), 203, to 10 January 1951. However, the draft dated ‘10. 1. 51’ lacks lines 15–20, and the whole poem was not represented in some form until a draft of lines 1–20 was completed on the next page before ‘6 Feb’. ‘Unfinished Poem’ is dated ‘1951’ in Collected Poems (1988), 61. There are eight pages of drafts after 22 August 1951 in Workbook 2, but only of six stanzas: the ten stanzas printed from a typescript Larkin made are not represented until five pages of drafts before 22 January 1953 in Workbook 3. The date 1 February 1976 given in Collected Poems (1988), 206, for ‘Morning at last: there in the snow’ cannot be a completion date: it applies only to a draft of the first three lines. Nor can 12 October 1944 be the completion date for ‘Within the dream you said’ (TNS X): that date is written in Workbook 1 below a draft of the first verse only.

But this is to consider only the workbook evidence: when a poem had been substantially drafted, Larkin would make revisions at typescript stage, or when he made typescript collections, or prior to publication or republication. The evidence of the workbooks and typescripts is in fact hardly ever the whole of the story of composition: all the versions of the text must be collated with the text as finally printed in order to establish the point at which he stopped making changes. A fuller account in the commentary of the bibliographical evidence and dates is less likely to mislead, and should in any case give a more vivid sense of the poet at work. The dates given in the present edition are therefore more precise than those previously available, and in quite a number of cases wrong dates have been silently corrected.14 The earliest and latest dates of composition are given in a chronological list at the end of the volume.

Also recorded, for the first time, are variant wordings from typescripts and manuscripts late in the composition process, and from printings that precede, or, in cases like some of the poems in In the Grip of Light and XX Poems, succeed, the published versions. In order to preserve the published versions as they were constituted originally (apart from errors and misprints), versions of the text that postdate them are placed among variant wordings. Variants in punctuation, word-division, letter-case or font are not recorded. To record even only variants in wording from the extensive drafts in the eight large workbooks, and from other manuscripts bearing early drafts, would require a large and complex apparatus criticus, and would be an altogether more elaborate and ambitious undertaking than is appropriate to this edition.

In the record of variants, cancellation – whether by scoring out, writing through, or, occasionally, by a reordering of words signalled by loops, brackets or arrows – is represented in all cases by a single strikethrough. Where most of a line undergoes change, the whole line is represented. Where a minor portion of a line is involved, the change is represented by the relevant portion from the copy-text (the ‘lemma’), a single square bracket, and the variant text. Thus,

21 Watched] She saw Watched Hull DPL 2/3/15

records that where in line 21 of the poem the copy-text has ‘Watched’, in the version in the typescript designated Hull DPL 2/3/15 ‘She saw’ is cancelled and replaced by ‘Watched’.

A major justification for a new edition is to provide, for the first time, a commentary on the poems. It covers: Larkin’s many comments on his work; closely relevant historical contexts; persons and places; echoes and allusions; and linguistic usage. The commentary will often outline the circumstances that gave rise to a poem, which should not, of course, be confused with what the poem explicitly says: John Osborne’s 2008 book Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction repeatedly demonstrates how critics have sometimes unjustifiably or riskily tied the meaning of the poems to a biographical context rather than to the text itself. However, Osborne himself is rightly careful not to deny the importance of the biographical circumstances, which were in most cases outlined by Larkin himself. ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’, for instance, was occasioned by, and relates with tender intimacy to, the death of Larkin’s father, right down to the detail of the jars containing a hundred or so pounds of jam that he left behind. Many such instances could be given. Osborne correctly insists that ‘An April Sunday brings the snow’ does not specify the sex of the ‘you’ addressed, the relationship of the speaker to that person, or indeed details of skin colour or ethnicity.15 But though the poem’s vagueness may transcend in some respects the particularities of the context that gave rise to it, that does not mean to say that all adducible alternative contexts are equally plausible, or equally relevant to what the poem may be about.

Here, however, is not the place to argue about the variable relation of biography to text: the editor’s duty ends with providing the reader with information that has some bearing on the poems, and it is for the reader to assess the pressure of that bearing. It may be helpful to call to mind a distinction made by Christopher Ricks between what went into the making of the poem and what went into the meaning of the poem;16 but in Larkin’s case there is often significant overlap.

As to echo and allusion, Larkin stated in 1955, somewhat sensationally, that he had ‘no belief in “tradition” or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets’, which he found ‘unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people’.17 It is not clear whether in saying this he is dismissing literary allusiveness tout court: his whole statement is so flatly dismissive – really, no belief in tradition? – that it is difficult to feel confident that in the phrase ‘casual allusions’ he is distinguishing those that parade literariness from those that bring literary enrichment. Maybe he is, however: according to his friend Jean Hartley, he relished the thought of his readers trying to locate the phrase ‘the less deceived’ in Hamlet, and felt that if readers picked up the context ‘it would give them an insight into his basic passivity as regards poetry and life’.18 And when the reviewer Anthony Cronin quoted the verse from Toads containing ‘Stuff your pension!’ and ‘the stuff | That dreams are made on’, Larkin wondered whether or not he had noticed ‘the concealed Shakespeare quotation’.19 In a letter of 21 November 1971 to Monica Jones, he acknowledges a source for the phraseology at the end of his poem Days:

It is also now common knowledge – he made no secret of it – that Larkin was influenced at different times by Yeats, Auden, D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Hardy, T. S. Eliot and others. In his poems, consciously or unconsciously, he echoes and alludes to other literature, and to jazz and adverts too, and he is sensitive to the nuances of slang and cliché. His letters are also highly allusive. So great was his capacity when young for mimicry and pastiche that a number of poems are thoroughly Yeatsian or Audenesque without being indebted to any particular passage in Yeats or Auden. In the commentary, only specific points of influence are recorded. When rejecting alleged sources and allusions and parallels, I have been guided by the same principle that I applied in my edition of The Poems of A. E. Housman (1997): that ‘the parallels are too general, commonplace, or conventional, or too lacking in verbal specificity, to convince’.21 It is my conviction, nevertheless, that many more traces of allusiveness remain to be uncovered in Larkin’s poetry.

ARCHIVES AND TEXTS

The principal archives containing Larkin’s poems are at Hull, London and Oxford. The largest, now housed in the History Centre at Hull, holds all but the first of the eight workbooks in which poems were drafted, various typescript collections and other typescripts the poet made, and poems tucked away in correspondence. The first workbook is in the British Library.22 The Bodleian Library has a copy of Sugar and Spice: A Sheaf of Poems by Brunette Colman (MS Eng. c. 2356), six poems written in August and September 1943, which Larkin sent to Bruce Montgomery;23 a typescript corrected in ink and pencil of forty-five other early poems (MS Eng. c. 2357), twenty-nine of which were published in The North Ship; and Larkin’s reworking of Bruce Montgomery’s poem Crewe (MS Eng. c. 2762).24 It also has poems Larkin included in letters, most notably in the extensive and invaluable correspondence with Monica Jones (MSS Eng. c. 7403–48, 7553–5), which the library acquired in 2006.

The workbooks contain much that is uncontroversially incomplete. Sometimes drafts of poems are extensive, but inconclusive, leaving either versions that are cancelled but not further revised or uncancelled alternative versions. Unfinished in these ways are such projected poems as Single to Belfast, of which there are just over fourteen pages of drafts in Workbook 2, or The Duration (alternatively titled Life), of which there are fourteen pages of drafts in Workbook 7, or Letters to My Mind, of which there are just over four pages of drafts in Workbook 8. The only way to present such material faithfully is in a complete transcription, with layout and cancellations correctly represented: anything else distorts what is there. This, however, would be an entirely different (and much more costly) undertaking from that of the present edition.

It is on grounds that the poet left only cancelled and incomplete versions of lines 3–4 of The Winter Palace that – not without regret – the poem has been removed from the canon in the present edition. The basis of the text printed in Collected Poems (1988), 211, Hull DPL [1/8/50],25 is a typescript with holograph corrections in pencil. Lines 3–4 are represented in Collected Poems as: ‘I spent my second quarter-century | Losing what I had learnt at university’. The problem is that Larkin cancelled ‘Losing’ at the start of line 4 and provided no alternative, and that he also cancelled lines 3–4 with a wavy line. Further, he drafted alternative versions of the lines below the typescript text, but, unfortunately, these drafts achieve neither a final version without uncancelled alternative versions nor a couplet that, like the rest of the poem, rhymes or half rhymes. Line 3 is left in two versions: ‘For something inside me is trying to wash [alternative shrug] off’ and as ‘For some time now my mind has been struggling’; line 4, as ‘Stuff that has stuck to my mind’. Given this state of affairs, it seems best to acknowledge that Larkin did not finish work on the poem, and leave it at that.

Great caution must always be exercised with manuscript (and especially workbook) materials. It is not possible in many cases for an editor to judge how (or even whether) pieces of text relate to each other, or when a poem is complete. Only the author has authority in such matters. However, it is often demonstrably an error to regard disparate pieces of text as belonging together just because they appear on the same page. A case in point is Hull DPL (2) 1/4/4. On this sheet are written: a title, underlined, with two lines of verse; an asterisk in the middle of the next line; five lines of verse after a blank line; and four lines of verse after another blank line. The title and two lines do not obviously relate to what follows them: they are in a different metre and a totally different register, with no shared vocabulary, and it has been established26 that they are a parody of the opening of Sidney Keyes’s Elegy (In memoriam S. K. K.). The groups of five and four lines that follow are not a continuation of the parody. In them, the only sign of internal coherence is that in the four-line section ‘the sandwiches they are cutting for me to take | – For they love me’ refers back to the parents mentioned in the previous section. To describe all this, as Susannah Tarbush does,27 as ‘the second poem which Larkin addressed to Penelope’ and as an ‘abandoned 11-line draft’ (implying a draft of the poem), is without warrant.

THE POET AND HIS POEMS

Larkin took practical steps to make sure his own manuscripts survived, as James Booth points out:

From an early age he carefully preserved his poetic manuscripts and, from 5 October 1944 to November 1980, he wrote (and carefully dated) virtually all his complete and incomplete drafts in a series of eight workbooks. The first of these he presented to the British Library as early as 1964. Moreover he gave Maeve Brennan a copy of the unfinished ‘The Dance’, and left a tape-recording of himself reading it. In 1975 he suggested to Betty Mackereth that she might make some money by selling her typescript of the unpublished poem ‘When first we faced, and touching showed’: ‘Flog it to Texas if it seems embarrassing.’28 He inserted typed fair copies of ‘When first we faced’, ‘Morning at last: there in the snow’ and ‘Love Again’ in the final workbook. His signals to posterity could scarcely be clearer. Thwaite records that Larkin ‘often referred … to work which would have to be left for the “posthumous volume” of his poems’.29 It is true that, at the very end of his life he suffered a loss of creative nerve. In his notoriously ‘repugnant’ (self-contradictory) will, his purist super-ego inserted a clause requiring his executors to destroy his unpublished work ‘unread’. Fortunately, in another clause, his poetic ego gave them full permission to publish what they wished (Motion xvi).30

However, the preservation of unpublished verse is not the only indication that he thought more of his poems would, or should, see the light: as James Booth again reminds us, numerous poems remained unpublished during his lifetime that he had tried to get published.31

Larkin’s keen interest in the preservation and publication of his poems is further evidenced by his habit, from the beginning, of making collections. There were eleven, in typescript, before the publication of The North Ship in July 1945. An account of these is given in Appendix 1, where it will be seen that the accoutrements of title pages and prefaces show the young Larkin fantasising about being a published writer. By early 1948,32 he had gathered together twenty-five poems under the title In the Grip of Light (Hull DPL 2/1/8). The collection contained:

‘The wind blew all my wedding-day’ [later in XX Poems, TLD, entitled Wedding-Wind]

‘Heaviest of flowers, the head’ [from TNS]

Plymouth: ‘A box of teak, a box of sandalwood’ [from Mandrake, May 1946]

‘At the chiming of light upon sleep’

‘Who whistled for the wind, that it should break’

‘Come then to prayers’

‘Coming at last to night’s most thankful springs’

‘Lift through the breaking day’

‘Past days of gales’

‘I put my mouth’ [from TNS]

The Quiet One: ‘Her hands intend no harm’ [from Mandrake, May 1946]

Getaway: ‘One man walking a deserted platform’ [from TNS, where it was untitled]

‘Many famous feet have trod’

Night-Music: ‘At one the wind rose’ [from TNS]

To a Very Slow Air: ‘The golden sheep are feeding, and’

Träumerei: ‘In this dream that dogs me I am part’

‘Within a dream, you said’ [from TNS]

‘Some must employ the scythe’

Winter: ‘In the field, two horses’ [from TNS]

Deep Analysis: ‘I am a woman lying on a leaf’

Thaw: ‘Tiny immortal streams are on the move’

Dying Day: ‘There is an evening coming in’

Two Guitar Pieces:

(i) ‘The tin-roofed shack by the railroad’

(ii) ‘I roll a cigarette, and light’

‘And the wave sings because it is moving’33

In the Grip of Light was a title that seemed to Larkin ‘to sum up the state of being alive’.34 He informed B. C. Bloomfield on 6 December 1976 that he had told Jenny Stratford that it was previously going to be called ‘Canto’, ‘and this explains the word “Canto” scribbled against a number of the poems in the manuscript book’. He continues:

In a 1964 interview with Ian Hamilton, Larkin described the title In the Grip of Light as ‘portentous’, and expressed relief that nobody accepted the collection.36 It remained in typescript.

Another early collection he made was XX Poems, in which the poems were numbered in roman:

Wedding-Wind: ‘The wind blew all my wedding-day’ [from ITGOL, later in TLD, again entitled Wedding-Wind]

Modesties: ‘Words as plain as hen-birds’ wings’

‘Always too eager for the future, we’ [later in TLD, entitled Next, Please]

‘Even so distant, I can taste the grief’ [later in TLD, entitled Deceptions]

‘Latest face, so effortless’ [later in TLD, entitled Latest Face]

Arrival: ‘Morning, a glass door, flashes’

‘Since the majority of me’

Spring: ‘Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings’ [later in TLD]

‘Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair’ [added to TNS, 1966]

Two Portraits of Sex:

(1) Oils: ‘Sun. Tree. Beginning. God in a thicket. Crown’

(2) Etching: ‘Endlessly, time-honoured irritant’ [later in TLD, entitled Dry-Point]

‘On longer evenings’ [later in TLD, entitled Coming]

‘Since we agreed to let the road between us’ [later in TLD, entitled No Road]

‘If my darling were once to decide’ [later in TLD, entitled If, My Darling]

‘Who called love conquering’

‘The widest prairies have electric fences’ [later in TLD, entitled Wires]

The Dedicated: ‘Some must employ the scythe’

Wants: ‘Beyond all this, the wish to be alone’ [later in TLD]

‘There is an evening coming in’ [later in TLD, entitled Going]

At Grass: ‘The eye can hardly pick them out’ [later in TLD]

XX Poems, unlike In the Grip of Light, did reach print, in the form of 100 copies of a booklet produced privately by Carswells of Belfast. Larkin tells Monica Jones in a letter of 17 October 1950 that he is thinking of having a pamphlet privately printed.37 He is characteristically scathing about the ‘shouting mediocrity’ of three quarters of the poems,38 and he dismisses all of them as ‘old friends, hopeless old friends whom you know will never get a job,’39 as ‘20 snivelling, not-very-interesting cerebrations’,40 and, when he has corrected the proofs, as ‘very bitty, scraps, motley’ lacking ‘cohesion or wealth.’41 In a letter of 20 February 1951 he tells James Sutton: ‘I have sent a typescript of 20 poems to the printers to be made into what I feel sure will be an ugly little booklet of ugly little poems. As far as possible I have excluded all the psalm smiting stuff: very many poems are left to moulder in my file.’42

Looking back in 1951, he confesses ruefully:

This has been a scrappy & troubled time with me, 1945–50, and very little grip or purpose is really likely to be reflected in its poems. I feel that there’s a high proportion of personal maunder, & here and there a putting-in of the foot – they aren’t at all the brilliant highpowered squad of dialectical descriptions that I’d like to pass round my friends – but there we are, the rejected ones are worse, so there’s no help.43

The title of the collection involved protracted deliberation:

Originally I’d thought of 20 poems for nothing, but Kingsley shuddered at it: said it was like Roy Campbell.

Apart from all the impossible kinds of title, I don’t like the drab kind (Poems), or the self-denigrating kind (Stammerings), or the clever kind (Stasis).

I want something unaffected & unpretentious – for Lord knows there are few to pretend anything about. Speaking from Experience? – sounds like ‘Twelve broadcast talks by the Radio Padre’.

I’ll get my booklet done, even if I have to call it Poetical Pieces.44

He flirts with the idea of a clever literary title from Flaubert:

On 11 February he is typing out final versions, and on 14 February the collection has gone to the printers with the plain title XX Poems:46

In the end I abandoned the Heart sample line, & despairing of ever choosing anything I could endure I fell back on ‘XX POEMS’, wch is about as free from offence as I can manage, & with a slight undercurrent of Guinness double X and Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

If you’d really liked Heart &c I might have had it, but really the word ‘heart’ does stick in my gullet.47

He expresses no great regard for the poems, but hopes their publication marks a change for the better:

As they stand now there is something about each one I like, though few I like in entirety. It seems funny to be without them – like having one’s hair cut. I should like to believe I shall now move on to a better era – less of Misery Inc., fewer easy-ways-out-via-Pessimist Drains, Ltd., more infrequent references to the Joy-through-Weakness movement.48

The collection was dedicated to Kingsley Amis: ‘because he inscribed The legacy to me, even if it never arrived at print’.49 The copies were delivered to Larkin on 27 April 1951,50 and the next day he enclosed a copy with his letter to Monica Jones. Looking back on 6 January 1955, he told Alan Brownjohn:

XX POEMS is not really a publication. In 1951 I thought the poems I had written would look well in type, so I had a local printer make a hundred copies of the enclosed collection for me privately. These I sent to various friends, and by now most have appeared in print elsewhere.51

Though he did not hold the collection in high regard, he did have favourites among individual poems. On 8 May 1951 he told James Sutton: ‘I think my favourite poems at present are I, V, XIV and XX, but I don’t mind any of them, except perhaps XIII which is included as being “very important” to show how my mind works.’52 On 10 July 1951 he declared:

The favourites seem to be I, V, XIII, XIV, and XX (if those are the right numbers): I like II and XII: in fact, I like them all except perhaps IX & X. Charles Madge was very nice about them: can’t think what he sees in them: his stuff is 1,000 times cleverer. My few friends have all been kind. I sent them round to a lot of big names – Eliot, Spender, MacNeice & co., but without any address, so they can’t answer even if they wanted to. And as I only put 1d stamps on (the rate has gone up to 1½d, they tell me) that’s perhaps as well. None of these has burst into print exclaiming that a new poet has arisen – at least, not so far as I know.53

In the Grip of Light was never published as a collection, and XX Poems was, in the poet’s own estimation, ‘not really a publication’. These might alone seem sufficient grounds for not preserving them as collections. A further, decisive reason, however, is that to do so would involve substantial duplication. Three poems appear in both collections, and two of those were included in The Less Deceived. Six more from In the Grip of Light and one from XX Poems were published in The North Ship; and a further eleven poems from XX Poems were chosen for The Less Deceived. Had Larkin regarded In the Grip of Light and XX Poems as having the integrity of published volumes in which the choice of poems and their order were sacrosanct, he would not have included so many of the poems in volumes published later.

Given his practice of collecting his poems, it is no surprise that Larkin was in favour of a collected edition of his poetry. On 7 July 1977 he told Charles Monteith of Faber and Faber: ‘there is nothing I should like more than a Collected Poems under your imprint’.54 And more than that? He was certainly far from hostile to the idea of unpublished material being made available. As a librarian giving a talk on the importance of preserving contemporary literary manuscripts, he once said that ‘Unpublished work, unfinished work, even notes towards unwritten work all contribute to our knowledge of a writer’s intentions.’55 In his introduction to Poetry in the Making, the catalogue of an exhibition of manuscripts of poems by British poets in the British Museum (1967), he spoke warmly about the attention scholars pay to manuscripts, and lamented the fact that, as manuscripts of British writers frequently ended up in American libraries, ‘definitive editions of such British writers will in all probability be American’.56

Publication and preservation are also editorial concerns. In the present edition the four main volumes published in Philip Larkin’s lifetime, The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) are preserved as collections and printed in order of publication. This was the arrangement favoured in the revised edition of Collected Poems (2003), but not in the earlier, larger Collected Poems (1988) where the editor, Anthony Thwaite, opted for a chronological arrangement of poems ‘completed by Larkin between 1946 and the end of his life together with a few unpublished poems which Larkin preserved in typescript’, followed by ‘a substantial selection of his earlier poems, from 1938 until the end of 1945’.57 To the four published volumes are appended two collections: of verse published in the poet’s lifetime but not collected by him, and of verse not published in his lifetime. In these two categories, the poems are arranged in a chronological sequence: in the first, according to publication date, in the second according to the date on which Larkin stopped working on each poem. At the end is a handful of undated poems.

There are always gains and losses in editorial choices. Coleridge advocated a thoroughgoing chronological arrangement on grounds that it enables the reader readily to follow a development (or a deterioration) from early to late.58 But such an arrangement is not without problems and disadvantages,59 and they are sufficiently weighty in Larkin’s case to have prevented its adoption in the present edition. The main reservations concern the representation of the corpus of published poems: Larkin was severe on himself in choosing to publish only a fraction of what he wrote; he was aware of the fact that published volumes would come to constitute the authorial identity; and, clinchingly, his choice of poems and arrangement of them within the published volumes – creative and critical acts both – were decisions he did not take lightly. Asked in 1981 whether he took great care in ordering the poems in a collection, he replied:

Yes, great care. I treat them like a music-hall bill: you know, contrast, difference in length, the comic, the Irish tenor, bring on the girls.60 I think ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’ is a good opener, for instance: easy to understand, variety of mood, pretty end. The last one is chosen for its uplift quality, to leave the impression that you’re more serious than the reader had thought.61 This turns characteristically self-deprecatory;62 but before it does so, the prompt candour of ‘Yes, great care’ is unmistakable. In terse gravity the phrase resembles his answer to a question about another concern of his: ‘Do you think much about growing older. Is it something that worries you? Yes, dreadfully.’63

The only loss incurred in respecting the integrity of the published volumes is a sense of the chronology of the composition of their contents, and of the relation in time, too, of poems chosen for inclusion to those excluded. Accordingly, at the end of the commentary a list of composition dates of all the poems is provided. Some dates (particularly of early poems) can only be approximate, but in most cases fairly precise dates can be given: those on which, or between which, Larkin began and stopped working on a poem. Still more precise dates, of the various stages of composition, are given in the notes on individual poems in the commentary.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1 In ‘Philip Larkin and the Bodleian Library’, Bodleian Library Record, 14. 1 (Oct. 1991), 54, 55, Judith Priestman announced that, under the stipulation of Mrs Ann Montgomery, widow of Bruce Montgomery, the letters from L to her husband are closed to readers until 2035, and that among Montgomery’s papers (not necessarily letters) are twenty-one early unpublished poems. Those she quotes from have now all been published, either in Tolley (2005) – though not from the Bodleian MSS – or in the present edition.

2 Anthony Thwaite’s selected edition of Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica appeared in 2010. In the commentary I draw upon the entire correspondence, most of it not included in Thwaite’s selection, citing the Bodleian classification numbers of the MSS, and providing cross-references to Thwaite’s edition when verse is published in it for the first time.

3 L in a 1982 interview with Paris Review (RW, 70): ‘I write – or used to – in notebooks in pencil, trying to complete each stanza before going on to the next. Then when the poem is finished I type it out, and sometimes make small alterations.’ This is confirmed in a letter to A. T. Tolley dated 30 Sept. 1982: ‘It was always my practice to transfer a poem from manuscript to the typewriter, usually at the point at which a coherent and consecutive version had emerged; this did not mean that that version was final’: Tolley (1997), 26.

4 I have made three exceptions to this principle: Compline, ‘Sting in the shell’ and ‘The poet has a straight face’. These poems have already been published, but without acknowledgement that the first two each contain one uncancelled alternative reading, and the third contains two. I record the alternatives in the variants.

5 CP (1988), xv. Some of the poems appeared only in XX Poems, which, given the limited private circulation of the collection, would extend the corpus of poems in CP (1988) still further.

6 Tolley (2005) xv.

7 On p. 16 there should be a comma after ‘sleep’; p. 21, there should be a comma after ‘snow’; p. 23, ‘blocks’ should be ‘block’; p. 28, ‘You have been here some time.’ should be in parentheses; p. 31, ‘will’ should be ‘Will’, ‘notes’ should be ‘rites’, and ‘the wish’ should be ‘one wish’; p. 36, ‘abdicated’ should be ‘abdicating’ (not corrected in CP, 2003); p. 45, there should be a comma after ‘o’clock’ (not corrected in CP, 2003); p. 62, ‘stationary’ should be in italics; p. 69, punctuation after ‘earth …?)’ should be a semicolon, not a colon; p. 76, ‘tiny first’ should be ‘first tiny’ (not corrected in CP, 2003); p. 105, ‘last’ should be ‘lost’, “Wrinkling’ should be ‘Wincing’, ‘waves’ should be ‘vanes’, and there should be a comma after ‘away’; p. 113, as noted by R. J. C. Watt in A Concordance to the Poetry of Philip Larkin (1995), xv, ‘brillance’ is of course a misprint for ‘brilliance’, corrected in the rev. edn (1990); p. 124, the comma at the end of l. 2 should be a full stop; p. 139, ‘windows’ should be ‘window’, ‘buses’ should be ‘’buses’, the full stop after ‘morning’ should be a dash, ‘goes down,’ at the end of l. 8 should be before ‘in fields’ in l. 9, and there should be a comma after ‘squares’; p. 141, ‘brides’ should be ‘bribes’, corrected in 1988 reprint; p. 171, L’s date ‘1969’ below Homage to a Government, omitted in 1988, is reinstated in 2003; p. 216, the misprint ‘Teachers’ for ‘Teachests’, which was taken from the text printed in The Observer, was corrected in 1990, though the punctuation at the end of l. 2 remained a comma instead of a semicolon; p. 219, the comma at the end of l. 6 should be a semicolon. In the poems from 1938 to 1945 (pp. 225–311) there are three errors of wording: p. 245, ‘shows’ should be ‘showers’; p. 259, ‘These’ should be ‘Those’; p. 271, ‘dimmed’ should be ‘dim’. There are also six errors of punctuation, of which I give details in the notes on the poems concerned. In CP (2003), p. 111, ‘Negroes’ should be ‘negroes’; p. 114, there should be a comma after ‘bash’; p. 125, ‘worthwhile’ should be ‘worth while’; p. 128, ‘cicatrised’ should be ‘cicatrized’; p. 134, there should be a comma after ‘lanes’.

8 This applies only to the texts of the poems. There are many other errors. See, for instance, the account of L’s early typescript collections in Appendix 1 to the present edition.

9 For a sample of the range of the editorial shortcomings, see the notes in the Commentary in the present edition on: Coventria, ‘The poet has a straight face’, ‘There are moments like music, minutes’, ‘At school, the acquaintance’, ‘O what ails thee, bloody sod’, ‘The doublehanded kiss and the brainwet hatred’ and Fourth Former Loquitur.

10 For the confusion that results when the source of the text is not clearly identified, see, for instance, the note in the Commentary on the text of ‘As a war in years of peace’.

11 As the accounts in Tolley (1997), 73–99, demonstrate.

12 See fn. 3 (above).

13 Introduction, xx.

14 This applies to dates in Motion (1993), as well as to those in CP and Tolley (2005).

15 Osborne (2008), 181.

16 Inventions of the March Hare. Poems 1909–1917 by T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks (1996), xxv.

17 RW, 79. L later stated that he assumed that D. J. Enright, who solicited the statement, would use the replies he received as raw material for an introduction to Poets of the 1950s, and that he was ‘rather dashed to find them printed verbatim’: RW, 79 n. John Skinner remarks: ‘and yet, after almost thirty years of writing poetry which subverts or even refutes the view expressed in this passage, Larkin then publishes the same lines verbatim himself’: ‘Philip Larkin by Philip Larkin’, Ariel, 20. 1 (Jan. 1989), 79.

18 Hartley (1989), 74.

19 To MJ, 28 July 1956: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7414/16. RC in Thwaite (1982), 34, remarks justly that L ‘is by no means as rigorous in avoiding quotation from others as might be thought to follow from his deprecation … of “casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets”’.

20 Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7443/128.

21 Introduction, lx.

22 L gave it as a gift. When he tells MJ about the donation in a letter dated 22 May 1964 (Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7428/38), he describes the notebook as ‘jammed with unpublished poems etc. […] all fearfully dull, stodgy humorless (?) thin Yeats-&-catpiss. Still.’ On 31 July 1964 he tells her: ‘Actually it’s a most interesting book, showing poems worth printing after years and years of crap’: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7428/95.

23 A seventh poem, Fourth Former Loquitur, is absent, but a corrected pencil draft is loosely tipped in between the final page and the cover of the Hull copy, DPL (2) 1/11, as James Booth notes (TAWG, 242).

24 None of these Bodleian MSS of early poems receives so much as a mention in A. T. Tolley’s volume of Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005).

25 The reference is missing from the Hull catalogue.

26 By Tim Kendall in AL, 2 (Oct. 2008), 10, and 28 (Oct. 2009), 17–18; and by Geoff Weston in AL, 30 (Oct. 2010), 15.

27 AL, 25 (Apr. 2008), 10.

28 ‘Written in a Kate Greenaway Valentine’s Day card, sent to Betty Mackereth on 30.xii.1975 (unpublished)’: Booth (2005), 205.

29 CP (1988), xxii.

30 Booth (2005), 18–19.

31 Booth (2005), 19.

32 A. T. Tolley in Hartley (1988), 168, and CP (1988), 217, both give 1947, when the collection may have been put together, but the date ‘1948’ is written in L’s hand on the front cover of the collection.

33 I have italicised titles and regularised their capitalisation in L’s typescript. A. T. Tolley’s account, ‘Philip Larkin’s Unpublished Book: “In the Grip of Light”’, Agenda, 22. 2 (Summer 1984), 76–86, is deeply flawed. From the list of contents (77) he omits Winter, Getaway and ‘At the chiming of light upon sleep’; he lists two poems, ‘If hands could free you, heart’ and ‘Kick up the fire, and let the flames break loose’, that are not in the collection; he gives the title To a Very Slow Air as Slow Song; he adds the title The Dedicated to ‘Some must employ the scythe’, which is untitled in ITGOL; and he omits the titles from ‘Her hands intend no harm’ and ‘There is an evening coming in’. The account in CP (1988), 317–18, contains only one error: in ITGOL, the opening of ‘Within the dream, you said’ (from TNS) is ‘Within a dream’.

34 To JBS, 28 Jan. 1948: SL, 144.

35 SL, 553.

36 FR, 26.

37 Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7403/ 78.

38 To MJ, 1 Nov. 1950: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7403/100.

39 To MJ, 5 Nov. 1950: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7403/109.

40 To MJ, 11 Nov. 1950: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7403/118.

41 To MJ, 13 Apr. 1951: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7405/34.

42 Hull DP 174/2/210.

43 To MJ, 28 Apr. 1951: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7405/40.

44 To MJ, 16 Jan. 1951: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7404/77, 78.

45 To MJ, 16 Jan., 31 Jan., 6 Feb. 1951: Bodl. MSS Eng. c. 7404/77, 78, 95, 96, 101.

46 To MJ, 11 Feb., 14 Feb. 1951: Bodl. MSS Eng. c. 7404/109, 112.

47 To MJ, 14 Feb. 1951: Bodl. MSS Eng. c. 7404/113.

48 To MJ, 11 Feb. 1951: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7404/113.

49 To MJ, 28 Apr. 1951: Bodl. MS Eng. c. 7405/40. The Legacy was Amis’s first novel, unpublished.

50 Bloomfield (2002), 17.

51 SL, 234.

52 SL, 171. I (Wedding-Wind), V (‘Latest face, so effortless’), XIV (‘If my darling were once to decide’), XX (At Grass), XIII (‘Since we agreed to let the road between us’).

53 SL, 173–4. I (Wedding-Wind), V (‘Latest face, so effortless’), XIII (‘Since we agreed to let the road between us’), XIV (‘If my darling were once to decide’), XX (At Grass), II (Modesties), XII (‘On longer evenings’), IX (‘Waiting for breakfast while she brushed her hair’), X (Two Portraits of Sex).

54 SL, 568. See also Jean Hartley (1989), 173.

55 RW, 99.

56 ‘Operation Manuscript’, FR, 122.

57 Introduction, xv.

58 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring (1990), 1. 453 (1 Jan. 1834).

59 See Ian Jack, ‘A Choice of Orders: The Arrangement of “The Poetical Works”’, in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome J. McGann (1985), 127–43. (‘Poetical’ was misprinted as ‘Political’, one of too many errors in the volume.)

60 The principle of arrangement is confirmed by Jean Hartley (1989), 68: ‘his aim was to make the tone as various as possible … by alternating poems with different atmospheres and styles rather than keeping the mood level and grouping similar poems together’. She notes that L did this not only for TLD, but for TWW and HW as well.

61 FR, 55.

62 Booth (2005), 16, notes L’s ‘affectation of casualness’, and Palmer (2008), 95, catches the subversive facetiousness of his reply, suggesting as it does ‘something of a party turn’ instead of great care. On grounds that L often says what his audience wants to hear, Gillian Steinberg, Philip Larkin and His Audiences (2010), 47, wishes to allow for L’s ‘Yes, great care’ being ‘equally disingenuous’. But it cannot be equally so if L is giving two different accounts of his practice and the second makes light of the first. Further, it is hardly plausible that L would immediately say he took little or no care. Steinberg’s allowance here sits oddly with her perceptions of L’s self-mockery elsewhere.

63 1979 interview with The Observer: RW, 55.