The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin

FAIN: FA-54609-09

Archie Burnett
Boston University (Boston, MA 02215-1300)

This will be the first complete scholarly edition of the poetry of one of the most popular British poets of the twentieth century. There has hitherto been no edition that is complete; that examines all of the texts, both manuscript and printed; that records textual variants that trace Larkin's compositional practices; and that provides a commentary that gives details of all versions of the texts, their dates, literary allusions and echoes, persons and places, closely relevant historical contexts, Larkin's own comments, and linguistic usage. In these respects the edition will eclipse previous editions: the two editions of Larkin's Collected Poems (1988, 2003) by Anthony Thwaite, and the edition of his early poems and juvenilia (2005) by A. T. Tolley. These previous editions were published by Faber and Faber, and it is this publisher that has commissioned this new edition, issued a contract, and set a delivery date of July 2010.