Happy Birthday, Philip Larkin

August 9 is the birthday of one of the 20th Century’s great poets and one of the English language’s great writers of recent memory, the late Philip Larkin. I’ve been returning to Larkin a lot in recent years. In times of grief and mourning and uncertainty, he’s one of the poets I turn to. There’s great comfort in his work, or at least, I’ve always found comfort in many of his poems. There’s lyricism and beauty in his work, but they sit alongside this dourness that some might call pessimism. It’s the sort of thing one can read and understand and parrot back when young, but takes on new, deeper meaning as one gets older.

I know little about Larkin, though I have always enjoyed that he was a librarian, a jazz critic and that he declined the post of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom and an OBE at different points in his life. He never married, was rarely recorded reading his poetry, and his letters which were published posthumously are troubling for what they reveal.

Still, I keep thinking of The Mower, and it’s final lines “we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.” Lines that I read when I was a child and I knew what they meant, knew that these lines were of a man who struggled with such sentiments, with such emotions, and as I am closer now to the man Larkin was than the child who first read them, they are more true than ever.

It reminds me that the Larkin centennial is only two years away. Maybe such an event will happen. I would like to go and celebrate with other similarly obsessed poetry fans and readers and walk the streets he knew. Maybe that will happen, maybe it will not. The poems live on, regardless.