In an early poem titled “I Remember, I Remember”, Philip Larkin imagines a train journey which returns him unexpectedly to his birth place in the English Midlands: “'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. 'I was born here.'” Comically echoing Thomas Hood”s Victorian poem of the same title, Larkin subtly deflates the familiar romantic childhood idylls associated with other writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas. The poem ends glumly with an acceptance of the unremarkable and the undistinguished: “'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere'”. Looking out on a changing English landscape from the vantage point of a train window was to become a hallmark of Larkin's work, memorably repeated in poems such as “Here” and “The Whitsun Weddings”. T

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First published 16 November 2002

Citation: Regan, Stephen. "Philip Larkin". The Literary Encyclopedia. 16 November 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2624, accessed 9 February 2010.]