Named Britain’s greatest postwar writer by the Times in 2008, Philip Larkin remains justly celebrated as a wry observer of life’s routines, banalities and quiet poignancies. He was a writer who once spoke of poetry as “enhancing the everyday”.
Yet much of Larkin’s reputation as a great British poet rests on the widely-held assumption that Larkin would have been greater still were it not for the demands of his day job as a librarian at the University of Hull between 1955 and 1985. In truth, there is much in Larkin’s poems and letters to support the view that Larkin was a reluctant librarian.
Now, as we celebrate the centenary of Philip Larkin’s birth in 1922, new research at the University of Hull’s Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing reveals Larkin’s dedication for his day job as a librarian at the University of Hull.
