The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin brings together what may be the most important body of poetry written in the post-World War II period.¹ The size of the volume comes as something of a surprise, however. Larkin, who died in 1985 at the age of sixty-three, published four slender books in his lifetime (the longest was forty-eight pages): The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974). Anthony Thwaite, the editor of the Collected Poems and one of the executors of Larkin’s estate, has brought forth a volume containing 242 poems—172 in a first section (“Poems 1946-83”) containing all of what Thwaite considers Larkin’s mature work (omitting, astonishingly, The North Ship) and seventy poems in a second section (“Early Poems 1938-45”). This latter section contains, in addition to The North Ship, twenty-two previously unpublished poems; the book’s first section, meanwhile, contains sixty-one poems in print for the first time. Both sections have poems from In the Grip of Light, a volume Larkin tried, and failed, to publish in 1947. All of the “new” poems—which have been retrieved from Larkin’s notebooks and typescripts—have been arranged chronologically in the book’s two sections along with the previously published material, both collected and uncollected. As it turns out, these added poems do not really enhance what one might legitimately refer to as Larkin’s real oeuvre. Most of the rejected poems—and this is what they must be called, as Larkin considered them unfit