Collected Poems

Robert Lowell was dragged out of a Buenos Aires hotel in a straitjacket. Then there was stark-raving-mad old Ezra Pound in Italy, spewing anti-Semitism for Mussolini. But no poet's bad behavior has more blatantly influenced his work than Philip Larkin's.

When he was 22, Larkin was so piss drunk at a literary reading that he mistakenly decided he was layered up enough to pee himself without anyone noticing. In his 30s, he gained notoriety around Britain's Hull University for his extensive porn collection. And his reputation was sealed when his collected letters revealed a lifelong litany of curse-strewn rants.

All this while serving his entire adult life as a college librarian. Yes, one who wrote novels about lesbians and poems about casual sex, and could never really commit to a woman, lying and cheating even after he'd gone deaf and become his country's most famous poet. But a librarian, nonetheless.

Twenty years after his death, a newly revised Collected Poems has arrived to remind us that Larkin was more the man's poet of the 20th century than Bukowski or Kerouac. Who else could have had the balls to declare to the staid, poetry-reading world lines like "When I see a couple of kids / And guess he's fucking her and she's / Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm / I know this is paradise" or "Books are a load of crap" or "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do."

They're the kind of disaffected aphorisms you might expect to find in the films of Neil LaBute, delivered with an honesty even Larkin's inheritors couldn't hope to replicate. Speaking about lying around after sex, Larkin notes, "Talking in bed ought to be the easiest," but instead, "It becomes still more difficult to find / Words at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind." In "Aubade," he starts the night with alcoholism ("I work all day, and get half-drunk at night"), and once the sun rises, we find him wrapped up in thanatopsis ("Death is no different whined at than withstood").

Unique among writers, the great poet is even granted the enviable liberty — and sad curse — of ignoring any audience but himself. Larkin spoke plainly and eloquently to that lonely man. And he spoke to him as his inner asshole, that crass, stubborn, and yet unavoidably lovable curmudgeon who tends to poke his head out at the most inopportune times.

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