Philip Larkin's 'Church going'.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

There’s not a lot needs saying. He was also born in Coventry, though his upbringing and mine couldn’t be more different and if ‘I remember I remember’ is anything to go by, he didn’t much like the place.

It’s easy to see him as the Eyeore of English poetry, but that would miss both the art and the performance of a character. The Chief Librarian of a Large University Library cannot be serious when he writes ‘books are a load of crap’.

Perhaps his star is currently fading as the personna attracts more attention than the poetry, more time spent on the letters than the poems, but Larkin was never going to be academically viable. You don’t need someone telling you what his poems ‘mean’. His work is both a reaction to ‘Modernism’ and a continuation of a much older tradition and can be enjoyed without commentary.

This is taken from his Collected Poems. (1988)

Edward Thomas' 'The Gallows'.

Edward Thomas (1878-1916).

Some poems just do their job and then leave the reader to deal with the after shock.

This is taken from Edward Thomas The Annotated Collected poems, edited by Edna Longley and published by Bloodaxe. Anyone with an interest in Thomas needs this book. Longely’s annotations are succint, illuminating essays on the poem.