[The following review commends poet Anthony Thwaite for including much of Larkin's unpublished work in Collected Poems, thereby revealing the careful editing and revising Larkin performed, and the deliberation with which he practiced his craft.]

Once, some years ago, when he was asked what he thought about the prospect of becoming Britain's poet laureate, Philip Larkin replied, "I dream about that sometimes—and wake up screaming. With any luck they'll pass me over." They didn't. The story goes that in 1984, by which time he had long been the most admitted poet of his generation in England, Larkin was offered the laureate's post—and refused it. Perhaps by then he knew his health was precarious. (He died of throat cancer on Dec. 2, 1985, at the age of 63.) But the refusal was also characteristic.

Larkin seemed to have led a life of refusals. He was an unmarried university librarian in a provincial town who described himself as looking "like a balding salmon," and who was used to renting rooms at the top of a house. He shied from publicity, rarely consented to interviews or readings, cultivated his image as right-wing curmudgeon and grew depressed at his fame. His art, too, refused both the glamorous technical innovations and myth-mongering of Modernism as well as the will to transcendence that empowered many of his peers. He preferred to write, in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires. "Desolation," he once remarked, "is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." But from such refusals he fashioned a rich body of work likely to stand as the most enduring of mid-century British poetry.

The publication of his Collected Poems, then, is an auspicious event, but one accompanied by some controversy. Larkin left ambivalent instructions about his unpublished work. One clause in his will asks that it be destroyed; another clause gives his executors some discretion in the matter. To the consternation of purists, one of those executors, the poet Anthony Thwaite, has fortunately decided to ignore Larkin's doubts. Of the book's 242 poems, 83 appear in print here for the first time. This swells the small output considerably, and may alter an opinion of Larkin—who published just four volumes of verse, one per decade—as a skimpy miniaturist.

Mr. Thwaite has made other decisions that will annoy other purists. The book is arranged chronologically but the early writing, from before 1946, is placed last, to one side of the poet's mature poems. And Mr. Thwaite has made only a "substantial selection" from Larkin's prodigious early work. With the later work, though the original order of each book's contents is listed in an appendix, we lose in this volume the canny force of Larkin's own arrangements, the juxtaposition of tones and themes. But to compensate, because of this edition's precise dating, we can now watch Larkin work out a problem over several adjacent poems, written within months of one another. In any case, whatever reservations some readers may have, Mr. Thwaite has done his task with an exemplary fastidiousness, and he has given us a fascinating and indispensable text.

I turned first to the "new" poems. They range from apprentice exercises of the late 1930's to occasional squibs from Larkin's last years. The general impression one takes away from reading them in bulk is an increased respect for Larkin's editorial judgment. None of these suppressed poems will detract from his reputation, but little here will add to it. There are, though, a few surprises—among them several marvelous poems, most of them late (the already famous "Aubade" and the haunting "Love Again" are two of them). And some unfinished poems from his notebooks, including "The Dance" from 1963-64, a sweet-and-sour narrative in a dozen 11-line stanzas which, if completed, would have stood with the poet's best.

The earliest poems—"pseudo-Keats babble," Larkin once called them—date from his schooldays, and their pastiche soon gives way to more serious imitations, demonstrating how thoroughly he absorbed the strongest initial influences on his imagination, Auden and Yeats. The menaced tone and vivid rhythms of Auden pulse in lines from a 1941 poem, "Observation":

Only in books the flat and final happens,
Only in dreams we meet and interlock,
The hand impervious to nervous shock,
The future proofed against our vain suspense….

Range-finding laughter, and ambush of tears,
Machine-gun practice on the heart's desires
Speak of a government of medalled fears.

This was soon after replaced by the austere plangencies of Yeats; warnings yielded to yearnings, and it is Yeats's voice that dominates Larkin's first collection, The North Ship (1945). But one is also struck now by tentative, muffled versions of what we have come to recognize as Larkin's own distinctive voice. Even with its affected teenage weariness, his apprentice sonnet "Nothing Significant Was Really Said" sounds a note we will hear clearly throughout his career. "What was the rock my gliding childhood struck, / And what bright unreal path has led me here?"

Even more curious is to discover startling anticipations. A poem from 1943, "A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb," seems now like a practice effort for the more famous "Church Going" of 1954. In "Spring Warning," written in 1940 and published in Larkin's school magazine, the troubling onset of spring is greeted by some who, muttering they are neither simple nor great enough to feel, "refuse the sun that flashes from their high / Attic windows." The phrase, of course, anticipates the great poem Larkin wrote a quarter-century later, "High Windows," the title poem of his final collection. It is both ironic and rueful about the brave new world of easy sex the young seem joylessly to enjoy, and the poet wonders about the happiness his elders once thought he'd laid claim to just by being young. But, in the eerie last stanza, his speculation drifts into a memory, an image that accuses what it laments:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The stark revelation of this endless nothing that overlooks and underlies experience is strangely offset by the nearly religious hush of the rhetoric. It is not the opposition between categories of knowledge—a relentless self-scrutiny on the one hand, and the perspectives of memory and desire on the other—that animate Larkin's best poems, but the tension between them.

The small book that first brought Larkin to prominence as a poet, and established his particular reputation, was The Less Deceived (1955). He chose that title, he once explained in a letter, for its "sad-eyed realism." The deception he conjured in order to cast it out was largely a self-deception: that romantic love or good intentions can save us from "singleness." What art exalts as "the individual," Larkin reminds us, is only isolation. The best poems in his two major collections, The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974), return to this work of disenchantment. The tone of later poems is darker, often more embittered, but throughout both books he casts a cold eye on love that always promises to solve and satisfy:

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.

The pathos of Larkin's work lies in that link with his losses, in his sense of having been obscurely betrayed. "Elsewhere underwrites my existence," he writes. The lost paradise of innocence obsesses him and his poems. Only because of the forlorn; noisy, mean clutter of our lives does this innocence seem a "solving emptiness" for which we hunger and are sickened by.

"Larkin's poetry is a bit too easily resigned to grimness don't you think?" Elizabeth Bishop once wrote to Robert Lowell. It is true that his range is rather narrow, but within its confines is a beguiling variety of tones and forms. He never repeats himself to make the same point, and his poems are more readily memorized than those of almost any other postwar poet. His wit can be at once mordantly satirical and unnervingly sadhearted:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Larkin first wanted to be a novelist, and early on wrote two novels that still give wry pleasure. His poems, too, are built from finely observed details and portraits of the England of council flats and tea towels.

Thomas Hardy, the poet from whom Larkin learned the most, said it was his melancholy satisfaction to have died before he was out of the flesh, to have taken the ghost's view of things. "To think of life as passing away is a sadness; to think of it as past is at least tolerable." Per haps Larkin viewed this world so astutely because he wrote as if from the other side. And when most of the flashier, more blustery contemporary literature has passed away, his poetry—ghostly, heartbreaking, exhilarating—will continue to haunt.