Editing Philip Larkin (section)

===Reception history===
{{Quote box |quoted=true |bgcolor=#FFFFF0 |salign=center
 |quote=Life is an immobile, locked,<br />Three-handed struggle between<br />Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)<br />The unbeatable slow machine<br />That brings what you'll get.
 |source=''from'' "The Life with a Hole in it" (1974),<br />''[[Collected Poems – 2003 edition (Philip Larkin)|Collected Poems]]''
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When first published in 1945, ''The North Ship'' received just one review, in the ''[[Coventry Evening Telegraph]]'', which concluded "Mr Larkin has an inner vision that must be sought for with care. His recondite imagery is couched in phrases that make up in a kind of wistful hinted beauty what they lack in lucidity. Mr Larkin's readers must at present be confined to a small circle. Perhaps his work will gain wider appeal as his genius becomes more mature?"<ref>Motion 1993, p. 132.</ref> A few years later, though, the poet and critic [[Charles Madge]] came across the book and wrote to Larkin with his compliments.<ref>Motion 1993, p. 191.</ref> When the collection was reissued in 1966, it was presented as a work of [[juvenilia]], and the reviews were gentle and respectful; the most forthright praise came from [[Elizabeth Jennings (poet)|Elizabeth Jennings]] in ''[[The Spectator (1828)|The Spectator]]'': "few will question the intrinsic value of ''The North Ship'' or the importance of its being reprinted now. It is good to know that Larkin could write so well when still so young."<ref>Motion 1993, pp. 358–60.</ref>

''The Less Deceived'' was first noticed by ''[[The Times]]'', who included it in its ''List of Books of 1955''. In its wake many other reviews followed; "most of them concentrated ... on the book's emotional impact and its sophisticated, witty language."<ref name="motion269"/> ''The Spectator'' felt the collection was "in the running for the best published in this country since the war"; [[George Sutherland Fraser|G. S. Fraser]], referring to Larkin's perceived association with [[The Movement (literature)|The Movement]] felt that Larkin exemplified "everything that is good in this 'new movement' and none of its faults".<ref name=Bradford144>Bradford 2005, p. 144.</ref> ''[[The Times Literary Supplement]]'' called him "a poet of quite exceptional importance".<ref name=Bradford144/> 

In June 1956, the ''[[Times Educational Supplement]]'' was fulsome: "As native as a Whitstable oyster, as sharp an expression of contemporary thought and experience as anything written in our time, as immediate in its appeal as the lyric poetry of an earlier day, it may well be regarded by posterity as a poetic monument that marks the triumph over the formless mystifications of the last twenty years. With Larkin poetry is on its way back to the middlebrow public."<ref>Motion 1993, p. 275.</ref> Reviewing the book in America, the poet [[Robert Lowell]] wrote: "No post-war poetry has so caught the moment, and caught it without straining after its ephemera. It's a hesitant, groping mumble, resolutely experienced, resolutely perfect in its artistic methods."<ref name=Motion328>Motion 1993, p. 328.</ref>

In time, there was a counter-reaction: David Wright wrote in ''[[Encounter (magazine)|Encounter]]'' that ''The Less Deceived'' suffered from the "palsy of playing safe".<ref name=Bradford144/> In April 1957, [[Charles Tomlinson]] wrote a piece for the journal ''Essays in Criticism'', "The Middlebrow Muse", attacking The Movement's poets for their "middle-cum-lowbrowism", "suburban mental ratio" and "parochialism"—Larkin had a "tenderly nursed sense of defeat".<ref>Motion 1993, p. 281.</ref> In 1962, [[Al Alvarez|A. Alvarez]], the compiler of an anthology entitled ''[[The New Poetry]]'', accused Larkin of "gentility, neo-Georgian pastoralism, and a failure to deal with the violent extremes of contemporary life".<ref name=Motion328 />

[[File:The Arundel Tomb at Chichester Cathedral (3).JPG|right|thumb|upright=1.44|This tomb in [[Chichester Cathedral]] of the [[Richard FitzAlan, 10th Earl of Arundel|Earl of Arundel]] and his wife [[Eleanor of Lancaster]] was the inspiration for Larkin's poem "[[An Arundel Tomb]]"|alt=The tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel in Chichester Cathedral, which is topped by a life-size sculpture of the couple. An unusual feature of the sculpture is central to Larkin's poem "An Arundel Tomb": "Such plainness of the pre-baroque / Hardly involves the eye, until / It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still / Clasped empty in the other, and / One sees, with a sharp tender shock, / His hand withdrawn, holding her hand"]]
When ''The Whitsun Weddings'' was released, Alvarez continued his attacks in a review in ''[[The Observer]]'', complaining of the "drab circumspection" of Larkin's "commonplace" subject-matter. Praise outweighed criticism; John Betjeman felt Larkin had "closed the gap between poetry and the public which the experiments and obscurity of the last fifty years have done so much to widen." In ''[[The New York Review of Books]]'', [[Christopher Ricks]] wrote of the "refinement of self-consciousness, usually flawless in its execution" and Larkin's summoning up of "the world of all of us, the place where, in the end, we find our happiness, or not at all." He felt Larkin to be "the best poet England now has."<ref>Motion 1993, p. 343.</ref><ref>Bradford 2005, p.  202.</ref>

In his biography, Richard Bradford writes that the reviews for ''High Windows'' showed "genuine admiration" but notes that they typically encountered problems describing "the individual genius at work" in poems such as "Annus Mirabilis", "The Explosion" and "The Building" while also explaining why each were "so radically different" from one another. Robert Nye in ''[[The Times]]'' overcame this problem "by treating the differences as ineffective masks for a consistently nasty presence".<ref>Bradford 2005, p. 238</ref>

In ''[[Larkin at Sixty]]'',<ref name=LarkinSixty/> amongst the portraits by friends and colleagues such as Kingsley Amis, Noel Hughes and Charles Monteith and dedicatory poems by John Betjeman, [[Peter Porter (poet)|Peter Porter]] and [[Gavin Ewart]], the various strands of Larkin's output were analysed by critics and fellow poets: Andrew Motion, Christopher Ricks and [[Seamus Heaney]] looked at the poems, [[Alan Brownjohn]] wrote on the novels, and [[Donald Mitchell (writer)|Donald Mitchell]] and [[Clive James]] looked at his jazz criticism.<ref name=LarkinSixty/>