Collected Poems

Since its publication in 1988, Philip Larkin's Collected Poems has become essential reading on any poetry bookshelf. Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this new Collected Poems returns the reader to the book Larkin might have intended: it is, for the first time, Larkin's 'own' collected poems.

Philip Larkin, poet, novelist and librarian, was born in Coventry in 1922. He published four volumes of poetry - The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) - for which he received innumerable honours including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the WH Smith Award. He also wrote two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and his journalism is collected in two volumes, All What Jazz: A Record Diary and Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose. He worked as librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death in 1985.
In 2003, he was chosen as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous fifty years by the Poetry Book Society; in 2008, The Times named him Britain's greatest post-war writer; and in 2016, a memorial stone in his name was unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.