Return To Larkinland

To celebrate National Poetry Day, and to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of Philip Larkin, writer and critic AN Wilson revisits the life and work of one of the greatest English poets of the 20th century - a poet soon to be honoured with a place in Poets Corner at Westminster Abbey. In Return To Larkinland, Wilson traces Larkin’s life from his childhood in Coventry, through his student days at Oxford and then his adult years working in university libraries, where he wrote both some of the best-loved and most notorious poems in the English language. Wilson, who knew Larkin in later life, remembers memorable encounters with the poet; this personal connection helps him to reveal a complex man with a complicated, and at times tortured, private life. As part of this candid exploration into Larkin’s life, Wilson will confront the allegations of racism, bigotry and misogyny which dogged his posthumous reputation, following the publication of the Selected Letters and biography. However, Wilson concludes that it is Larkin’s poems, not his faults, that have survived. Featuring readings of his work by Larkin himself, including masterpieces such as The Whitsun Weddings, Arundel Tomb, Church Going and Aubade, Wilson argues in this programme that Larkin spoke for Britain between the 1950s and 1970s perhaps more than any other writer.