Larkin Alone and Together : COLLECTED POEMS <i> by Philip Larkin edited with an introduction by Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $22.50; 330 pp.; 0-374-12623-2) </i>

The reputation of Philip Larkin, who died in 1985, had rested on three slim volumes published at 10-year intervals: “The Less Deceived,” “The Whitsun Weddings” and “High Windows.” His canon was small but it never misfired. True, there was “The North Ship,” but this was juvenilia. Its confused poetic seemed all the more negligible because the mature poetic had such a hard, clear focus.

This focus had been achieved through rigorous selectiveness. Larkin carefully excluded poems and arranged the chosen ones, within each book, into a pattern for purposes of contrast and comparison, comic relief, and building to a climax and building down.

“Collected Poems,” then, arouses an anxiety. Its editor, Anthony Thwaite, has reprinted the juvenilia (though it is relegated to the back of the book), rescued poems Larkin excluded, placed them alongside the ones he included, and arranged all in a chronological sequence.

What is consequently lost is the sense Larkin so prized of the single volume as a crafted isolated artifact. There was an impersonality of craft that seems to have been important to Larkin, despite the apparently personal voice he liked to adopt.

What is gained, however, is a sense of increased closeness to Larkin’s personality and poetic development. Larkin the man looms in a vivid and almost unnerving way because many of the poems he excluded reiterate his characteristic themes in a more raw form, more nakedly and immediately.

His obsession with death rears up repeatedly in the excluded poems, less funny there, less fictionalized.

The number of excluded poems, too, in which Larkin makes the decision to live alone, shows that the decision had to be repeatedly made. Perhaps his sense of the difficulty of the decision made him exclude “Counting”:

counting up to two

Is harder to do;

For one must be denied

Before it’s tried.

The telling simplicity in which Larkin specialized required him never to be simplistic.

Witnessing Larkin excluding poems such as this, and reworking material from excluded poems into famous ones, takes the reader into an exciting closeness to Larkin’s poetic process. The poet is shown to be highly productive in some periods, not productive at all in others (each poem is carefully dated), fallible, painstaking, inspired. Larkin’s confrontation, in his juvenilia, with a number of modernist influences (Yeats, Eliot, Auden, even Dylan Thomas) are more clearly revealed as relevant to his mature practice. The process by which he absorbed these influences and overcame them--partly through the counterinfluences of Hardy--can be observed in detail.

This is important because Larkin has been such a potent anti-modernist force in British poetry. In the 1950s, when U.S. modernism was flush with new energy (Black Mountain, the Beats, Frank O’Hara), Larkin and his friends led a realist backlash against modernism in Britain.

However, what this book reveals is that the potency of Larkin’s anti-modernism arose from the way his poems learned--through their contact with Yeats and the others--to take modernism into account in the act of opposing it, apparently to review its arguments and then refute them.

Frequently there is a modernist skepticism about language implied in his poems that immunizes his realism against charges of naivete. Larkin’s words often call attention to themselves--by being suddenly colloquial or recherche or by employing exaggerated sound effects--to show that he doesn’t think they are a clear medium. Vagrants in “Toads Revisited” turn “over their failures/ By some bed of lobelias”; the moon in “Sad Steps” is a “Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!” and evokes “wolves of memory! Immensements.”

Larkin makes frequent use, too, of the montage effect he learned from Auden, placing separate scenes or actions on top of each other as a way of evoking a whole society. In “MCMXIV” montage is used to summon up the innocence of pre-1914 England. However, the smart maneuver Larkin learned--and developed with increasing sophistication--was to assign these modernist elements a subsidiary place in a dominantly realist context, thereby subjecting them to a kind of repressive tolerance.

“Collected Poems” shows how Larkin learned to do this. The process was lengthy. There were, however, sudden advances. Certainly there is a gulf in quality between the last of the juvenilia, “Who whistled for the wind, that it should break”--afflatus subverted by flatulence--and the first mature poem “Going.”

In this poem, probably written in February, 1946, Larkin imagines a “real” person in a “real” situation. He does the same in “Wedding Wind,” dated 26 September, 1946. In these poems he initiated his maturity by starting from premises opposite to those of his modernist precursors, for whom “reality” is always something to be put in quotation marks, and whose poems create their own, sometimes hermetic contexts.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s he evolved a poetic whose first concern was to establish a consensus with his readers based on shared experience. What is made clearer, however, by tracing his development through this book, is that this poetic evolved through a dialogue with modernism.

The poem, “The Whitsun Weddings,” can be seen, in this context, as a realist rereading of “The Waste Land’s” fertility metaphor. What does all that Jessie Weston stuff really mean to someone living in industrial mid-20th Century- England? Something like this: numerous couples heading on the same train toward their wedding nights in a London “spread out in the sun/ Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat,” and

all the power

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow shower

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

“Collected Poems” is valuable for allowing this context to be more clearly discerned, and for the fact that, although it fattens him, it everywhere suggests the slimmer Larkin trying to get out.