Collected Poems

Rating:
Summary: Great reading
Review: Collected Poems is one of the greatest collections of poems ever assembled by one of the greatest English-speaking poets in the world, Philip Larkin (1922-1985). This is a book that should be read by all poetry enthusiasts. Collected Poems encompassed Philip Larkin's entire published poetry career as well as some unpublished poems. Larkin's previously published works in this book are The North Ship published in 1945, the pamphlet on XX Poems published in 1953, The Less Deceived published in 1955, The Whitsun Weddings published in 1964, and High Windows published in 1974. While one could almost never find anything wrong with a collection of poems as numerous as in this book, there is one. The poems are no longer in chronological order. That is, the poems in Collected Poems are no longer in the order that Philip Larkin had intended them to be. This does not matter if one reads each poem separately. However, true readers of poetry must take into account the poems that come before and follow each separate poem. The poems were ordered by Larkin for a specific reason and meaning. This meaning Larkin shows to the reader is lost when the poems are not in the same chronological order as when they first appeared.The language Larkin uses in his poetry makes his poems what they are, magnificent. Larkin does not write in a lofty, scholarly voice. He uses every day language that common people use, and more importantly, understand. The poet is often an ordinary person looking at his subjects. This gives the poem a colloquial language. Larkin's use of ordinary language does not mean his poems are simple. They are far from that. The final stanzas wrap up his poems with intense meaning and symbolism. Aubade and High Windows are two poems that have profound meanings yet are written for all to understand. Simple words does not imply simple meanings to Larkin's poems. Almost every single poem in this book leaves the reader thinking.
Everyday situation are the subjects of most of Larkin's poems. Waiting for Breakfast While She Brushes Her Hair is an example of these. Other poems are On Being Twenty-Six, How to Sleep, Continuing to Live, Love Songs in Age, and Talking in Bed to name a few poems that have subjects that deal with everyday life. These poems carry with them lofty meaning with simple language to get the poet's point of view across. From this book one can learn lessons on marriage, money, women, pictures, and overall daily life.

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest poets of the (past) century
Review: Philip Larkin no longer needs any introduction: he is widely recognised as one of the greatest English poets of the twentieth century.
His poetry may however not be to everyone's taste: there is no place for lace and flowers in Larkin. His work is more often than not dark and reflects the feelings of a man who probably felt everything was wasting away about him: not only his own life, but the world as a whole. Through his poems we discover a man who seems to have skipped childhood and adolescence and who finds himself at fifty having had life pass him by. Larkin's poetry expresses his sourness, his fears, his repressed anger, his spite, his general disgust with society and the modern world. And it does this in the most expressive of ways, never shying away from the words that seem necessary, however crude they might be. There is much beauty in his despair.
If you are sensitive to poetry, then you cannot avoid reading Larkin. Be warned however that you should not read Larkin to brighten up your life: the "happy poems" are few and far between. But read him nonetheless and decide afterwards whether his work is to your liking. He may just hit the spot on one of those lonely evenings when you feel yourself that everything just isn't as it should be. And after that, you will never be able to separate yourself from a copy of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems...

Rating:
Summary: Larkin will make you love poetry
Review: Philip Larkin once remarked that he felt the poet should take the reader by the hand and lead them right into the poem. Maybe that is just another way of saying that his poems are accessible and will touch you even when reading them for the first time.

Yes, Larkin does embody the somewhat grumpy spirit of post-war Britain, but like all good poetry they are about the something that seems to be missing in our lives. There are some feelings no writer has ever put more precisely. Formally rather conservative (rhyme, no daring metaphors), the vocabulary is utterly down to earth. "Talking in bed should be easiest," Larkin begins, only to find out that with the lengthening of the silence "It becomes stil more difficult to find / Words at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind."

The feelings expressed may not always be nice, nor is this much of a self-help book, so it is utterly opposed to the spirit of our times, but this "old-type natural fouled up-guy" will make you love poetry if you are not yet sure about whether your do ("to prove our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love.") Get this European poet looking at himself as if he were a complete stranger as a contrast to you confessional poets!