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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
American poetry lovers have of late been treated to two sandbag-size volumes of collected poems: those of James Merrill, edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, and those of Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. The more slender oeuvre of the British poet Philip Larkin (1922-85) has been posthumously honored in another style of lavishness, with not one but two "Collected Poems." The earlier volume, edited by Anthony Thwaite, was published here by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1989, and the second, a hundred pages shorter and also edited by Thwaite, has just been published, also by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (paper; $14). This singular double homage came about not through any carelessness but from an abundance of the caring that Larkin's work arouses in its admirers.
Thwaite, a distinguished poet and critic and a longtime friend of Larkin's, was delighted to discover, as he undertook, in 1986, the duties of a literary executor, that the deceased poet had been a methodical preserver of his own drafts and copious youthful efforts. In a 1959 essay, "Not the Place's Fault," on his boyhood, in Coventry, Larkin remembered, "I wrote ceaselessly . . . now verse, which I sewed up into little books, now prose, a thousand words a night after homework." Seven of the little books were among his effects, four dating from the period between September of 1939 and August of 1940, and three produced in 1941 and 1942, when he was at Oxford. From 1944 on, Larkin, setting up shop as a postgraduate writer, preserved and dated his handwritten drafts, as they moved toward typed, corrected, and final versions. He had become, after his graphomaniacal boyhood, a scrupulously slow and patient reviser. Thwaite cites the eight-line poem "Take One Home for the Kiddies," which was begun in April of 1954 and completed in August of 1960. Less prolonged but effortfully fitful was the progress of two of Larkin's finest longer poems. Thwaite reports:
"Church Going," begun on 24 April 1954, went through twenty-one pages of drafts, was "abandoned 24.5.54," and then resumed and completed in July of that year. "The Whitsun Weddings," begun in May 1957 with its first stanza complete, was then dropped, resumed in July 1958, reworked for twenty-three pages until 6 September, picked up again on 19 September and completed after eight further pages of drafts on 18 October.
Given this unlooked-for wealth of creative specifics, Thwaite and his fellow-executors decided to produce a chronological arrangement that ignored the order Larkin himself had used in his four commercially published collections--"The North Ship" (1945), "The Less Deceived" (1955), "The Whitsun Weddings" (1964), and "High Windows" (1974). The first "Collected" opens not with the poems of "The North Ship" but with the earliest poem, "Going," that Larkin chose to publish in "The Less Deceived." Thwaite's introduction calls it "the first poem of his maturity." "Going" is followed, however, by a number of poems not included in "The Less Deceived" but appearing, rather, in the unpublished collection "In the Grip of Light" (1947) or in the self-published "XX Poems" (1951), which Larkin pulled together after "The North Ship," published by the raffish Reginald Caton's small Fortune Press, sank with scarcely a trace.
Thwaite incorporated a number of poems never published by Larkin in any form and in some cases left unfinished. Some of the unfinished poems, like "Negative Indicative" and the hundred-and-thirty-two-line "The Dance," come from Larkin's prime and...
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