The Whitsun Weddings

This is nice compact edition containing some of my favorite Larkin poems, including the "Whitsun Weddings," "Talking in Bed, " etc.

The best spoken rendition of these poems, or any Larkin poems, I have heard. Besutifully read and recorded.

Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (Faber, 1964)Philip Larkin's fifth collection of poetry, The Whitsun Weddings, was the one that firmly established him as one of Britain's major poets. He remains today one of the best-known and most popular British neoformalists. A devotee of Yeats, Hardy, and Dylan Thomas, Larkin never wears his influences too far away from his sleeve, but don't begrudge him that; marvel, instead, that in the turbulent anything-goes sixties lived a poet, misanthrope, and mild-mannered librarian (all in the same body, no less!) who swam against a stream of free verse and wrote, arguably, better formal verse than anyone since Swinburne.Larkin is a master of enjambment; if you encountered a random Larkin poem isolated from a collection, you might well not realize it's a formal poem until you're well into it, a hallmark of the best formal work. It reads easily and well, and Larkin never allows the meter and rhyme to get in the way of image; in short, Larkin combines the best traits of both lyric and narrative poetry, and packages them up neatly for the reader in small verse of purest pleasure.Okay, I've just spent two paragraphs describing the best of Larkin's work. Thankfully, this collection is more "best" than "worst." But one of the tragedies of the formal poet, and one no formal poet (save, perhaps, Dante Alighieri) has ever been able to avoid, is that when you're not on top of your game, slipping a notch or two down the ladder of quality leads to the steepest of descents. The sublime can become the ridiculous far faster in formal verse than in free verse, leading to a judgment of "when he screws up, man, does he REALLY screw up." Such is the case with Larkin. The dulcet tones and free-flowing nature of his best work curdle in the mouth when he's off form, leaving trite rhymes, dull rhythms, and some of the most godawful thumping lines one is likely to see outside Helen Steiner Rice.Still, as I said, there is far less bad than good in The Whitsun Weddings, and it does deserve its place in the annals of British literature. For those who wonder where all the formal verse has gone, Philip Larkin is one of the four or five modern poets to whom anyone can point to say "verse may be out of favor, but believe me, it is still alive and well." ***

I sat down to read (actually, re-read) THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS already of the opinion that Philip Larkin, for me, is one of the three greatest poets in the English language of the Twentieth Century. Re-reading THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS only re-enforced that opinion.THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS, from 1964, is one of three collections of his mature verse that Larkin released for publication during his lifetime (the other two being "The Less Deceived", 1955, and "High Windows", 1974). It contains what I believe is not only Larkin's best poem, but one of the best from the Twentieth Century period -- "Dockery and Son". In all, there are thirty-two poems in the book. The longest is the title poem, "The Whitsun Weddings", at eighty lines; the shortest is only six lines. One of the things I like about Larkin is that his poetry is formal. For example, more than three-quarters of the poems in this volume employ end-rhyme. But Larkin is very deft in working within his formal constraints (his use of enjambement is particularly skilled and creative), so that rarely do his poems feel at all conventional or strait-jacketed.Larkin released THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS when he was forty-two. Already, the most conspicuous theme is how suddenly life has gone by. (Example, from "Dockery and Son": "Life is first boredom, then fear. / Whether or not we use it, it goes".) There are related musings on the attractions of bachelorhood (or is it fear of commitment?) and an ambivalent attachment to the structure and discipline of work (Larkin was a university librarian). Several of the poems give voice to Larkin's uneasy relationship with formal religion and two of them express his love for jazz. The overall tone is one of melancholy, with a distinct trace of nostalgia -- not in the form of a desire to go back in time but rather in the bitter recognition of the passage of time.Here is one of the more unheralded small gems from the volume, entitled "Home is so Sad":Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,Shaped to the comfort of the last to goAs if to win them back. Instead, bereftOf anyone to please, it withers so,Having no heart to put aside the theftAnd turn again to what it started as,A joyous shot at how things ought to be,Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:Look at the pictures and the cutlery,The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Lovely powerful words

The book contains only Notes, Commentaries, Background, History but no poems. If you are looking only for the above, then go for it. It had notes of about 30 poems.

fantastic

His poetry is interesting, but quite negative in regards to post-war Britain, a time of rationing and Americanized consumerism. The poetry is reflective, somewhat bitter and shrouded in loneliness. This is a collection of poetry that is beneficial for understanding the austere atmosphere of Larkin's perspective. This book also has reasonable space for making annotations, so is worth a purchase for study or enjoyment.

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