Perhaps all you need to know about Larkin's miserable childhood revolves around his father. Coventry city treasurer Sydney Larkin displayed a small statue of Hitler on a mantelpiece of their home. Its arm rose in a salute at the press of a button. What better illustration of the dark bitterness of the poet's future writing on provincial bleakness could there be?
In his later years Philip Arthur Larkin, born on 9 August 1922 would look back on his childhood with gloom, referring in his poem 'I Remember, I Remember' to his time 'unspent' in Coventry.
He graduated with a first class English degree from St John's College Oxford. Kingsley Amis and Bruce Montgomery became his friends at the college and he indulged his love of jazz. Influenced by WH Auden, DH Lawrence and William Yeats, Larkin published the first of his poems in 1940, when Ultimatum appeared in the national weekly The Listener. For a time, together with Amis and others, he was associated with a school of writers dubbed by The Spectator magazine The Movement. Its rational approach was anti-romantic and sardonic, addressing everyday life in plain straightforward language.
Larkin wrote his first novel, Jill, in 1946 and a second, A Girl in Winter, about a refugee librarian in a bleak province, was published in 1947. After failing to get a civil service job he took work as librarian in Shropshire.
Larkin's first major acclaim came in 1955, the year he became librarian at Hull university, with his poetry collection The Less Deceived. The work's melancholic, sarcastic swiping at life and his perceived lack of social ability earned him the nickname Hermit of Humberside.
His 1964 poetry collection, The Whitsun Weddings, received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and Larkin was also writing record reviews for The Daily Telegraph. His 1973 Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse broke with the past by adding many lesser known writers to the accepted greats. Poets such as Auden and John Betjeman praised it while others with a more traditional outlook attacked it.
He published his last poetry collection, High Windows, in 1974 and his last major poem, 'Aubade', in 1977. He declined to succeed Sir John Betjeman as Poet Laureate, because he did not want the media attention.
He died in 1985, aged 63. Published posthumously against his wishes, previously unseen writing such as Collected Poems, 1988, and The Selected Letters, 1992, revealed a mass of lechery and a man riddled with prejudice. The motivations and thoughts of this detached man have remained hotly debated since. Should these ramblings be treated as his private attempt to exorcise the ghosts of his Coventry past or as a reason for him to be reviled?
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