It’s 35 years since the death of my favourite English poet, Philip Larkin.
Larkin's public persona was that of a lugubrious and mirthless Englishman who disliked fame and had no patience for the trappings of literary life, yet in 1986, a year after Larkin’s death, Peter Levi, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote of him:
His life was led privately and in the provinces, the job into which he drifted was obscure, and those who did not know him thought him a recluse. Yet no one was more loved, no poet I have ever met was so entertaining, so generously witty, or such an enhancer of life to his friends, who formed rather a wide series of intersecting circles.
Larkin's public persona was that of a lugubrious and mirthless Englishman who disliked fame and had no patience for the trappings of literary life, yet in 1986, a year after Larkin’s death, Peter Levi, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote of him:
His life was led privately and in the provinces, the job into which he drifted was obscure, and those who did not know him thought him a recluse. Yet no one was more loved, no poet I have ever met was so entertaining, so generously witty, or such an enhancer of life to his friends, who formed rather a wide series of intersecting circles.
A memorial stone dedicated to Philip Larkin was installed at Poets' Corner in 2016 between those of Anthony Trollope and Ted Hughes and adjacent to the tomb of Chaucer.
Poets' Corner is the name traditionally given to a section of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey because of the high number of poets, playwrights, and writers buried and commemorated there.
Larkin is arguably the most widely quoted poet of modern times and his best-known poems, An Arundel Tomb, Aubade and This Be The Verse are as fine a monument to him as any commemorative stone could ever be.
Horace, the father of poetry, writing in the first century BC, considered a poet's work to be 'a monument more lasting than bronze/And loftier than the pyramids of kings'.
Horace, the father of poetry, writing in the first century BC, considered a poet's work to be 'a monument more lasting than bronze/And loftier than the pyramids of kings'.
I wrote this affectionate poem in 2016 and it appears in my 2017 Stone Witness collection.
Philip Larkin was born on 9th August 1922.
THIS BE THE OTHER VERSE
They carve in stone, engravers do,
Your name with start and finish dates
Then hand it to some cleric who
Abuses boys and masturbates,
Who then invites a bunch of craps
Up to the Abbey in best suits,
For lengthy speeches and back slaps,
Daft eulogies and organ toots.
It fucks you up, this being dead:
But I was fucked up long before.
I left behind so much unsaid
And, still unwritten, poems galore.
But now, turns up a stone that’s like
A library book long overdue.
I sit on my celestial bike
And, gazing down, applaud the view.
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