The Complete Larkin

Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett, The Complete Poems (Faber)

Absolutely not.

I just caught Archie Burnett being interviewed on Radio 4's review programme talking about the job he's done on repackaging Larkin again. That is not a tautology, I'm afraid. I meant to say both 'repackaging' and 'again'.

Larkin is somehow accused of having published little and even being 'constipated' and the discussion wondered if he might have been surprised to find that his Complete Poems now run to 768 pages.

I expect he probably would, and mainly because he decided at a very early stage which of his poems were finished and warranted publication and that he didn't think that every little verse he put on a Christmas card was meant for the oeuvre, the supposed 'legacy', the 'work'.

That might have been one of the reasons, the quality control, that brought him such tributes as being regarded as the finest poet of his generation when, at a very early stage in his career, it did.

There is really no need to buy this book if you have Larkin's poems in any of their other iterations already. Why does one need an eighth, ninth or tenth edition of his best poems taking up shelf space when one has them so many times already. Burnett's arguments in justifying this unnecessary volume were specious at best and nothing that he said in praise of the poet justified it and there was certainly no need to make improper remarks about the work of Trevor Tolley, whose imaginings of which records might have formed Larkin's jazz collection might have gone a little bit too far already.

If academics can find nothing better to do then it must be time that there were fewer of them. This is very likely to be the best collection of poems published in 2012 but that is not the point.