The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin. Edited by Archie Burnett.

Philip Larkin's fame could rest on a dozen poems alone. Even while he was still alive, the poet and lifelong librarian at Hull University in the north of England was considered by many to be one of the finest writers of his generation. With his love of jazz, beautiful women and the grey palettes of post-war Britain, his witty, acerbic verse was a fine counterpoint to the more sentimental stuff produced by the London-born poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman. Eminently quotable, Larkin's poetry caught a spirit of middle-class disaffection and quiet rebellion. He became known for the short, aphoristic sayings contained within the four slim volumes of poetry he published in his lifetime, such as the assertion that “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three”. His poems were pithy and to the point; short, but often demanding to be reread.

Mr Burnett presents a very different picture of Larkin from the one by which he came to be known; one that is far more literary, and occasionally far more amusing. A reader can now trace Larkin's development from his allusive Oxford University Labour Club Bulletin efforts “about trees and the sky and the seasons” to his more mature, better-known works. It may be common knowledge that his greatest poem, “The Whitsun Weddings”, took three painstaking years to complete, but it is less well known that during those years Larkin was writing constantly, and continually discarding his efforts.

The advantage of such a comprehensive volume is the possibility of tracing the development of a writer's voice. It is possible to hear in his poem, “On Being Twenty-six” the tone of world-weariness an older Larkin would make into an art form, looking back on “the slag/Of burnt-out childhood” with his familiar tone of regret laced with misanthropy: “Life, you aren't a god, you're a bloody old sod.” He disliked modern poetry, or the vogue for experimentation; even aged 18 he despaired of the lack of wit in contemporary literature: “Nothing like comedy/Can ever be admitted as poetry.” Women continued to remain a mystery to him, even after he left university, and mostly lost the stammer he had had since childhood. Now, instead of dreaming of “The idea of a kiss”, he merely knew his limits: “A bosomy English rose/And her friend in specs I could talk to.”

However, despite Mr Burnett's efforts, the contrast between Larkin's published poetry and his unfinished efforts remains. Frequently scatological, often crudely misogynistic, some of Larkin's unpublished work makes for uneasy reading. Sketches of poems which rhyme Jung with dung or James Joyce's “Ulysses” with faeces seem intended as private jokes, and they add little to the volume. Larkin himself was aware of this, entitling one series “Dances in Doggerel”. There is a reason why Larkin, normally so particular in his use of words, deemed them unworthy for publication.

Instead, his finest poems remain his best-loved: ones about his mother overhearing him playing blues records on the gramophone, or of feeling, once a guest has left, “the instantaneous grief of being alone”. They take place on trains or in an empty church, where the atheist Larkin takes off “My cycle-clips in awkward reverence”, and capture life as Larkin saw it, expressing “A hunger in himself to be more serious”. But it speaks of their greatness that these short poems, despite being swamped by so many of his other efforts, still manage to stand out.