Larkin Revisited

Other

BBC Radio 4 FM

BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

Radio 4

Radio 4 (FM)

Documentaries

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, unpicks Philip Larkin's poems in his centenary year.

Across ten programmes and ten Philip Larkin poems, Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, finds out what happens when he revisits and unpicks Larkin's work in his centenary year.

Across ten programmes and ten iconic Phillip Larkin poems, Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, finds out what happens when he unpicks Larkin's poems in his centenary year, and lets the language that entered the culture resonate as he goes about his own life as a poet.

p0cr9ssw.jpg

BBC Radio 4 LW

Larkin Revisited: Born Yesterday

Born Yesterday

BBC Radio 4 - Larkin Revisited, Born Yesterday

Simon Armitage explores Philip Larkin's poem Born Yesterday.

Across ten programmes and ten iconic Phillip Larkin poems, Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate, finds out what happens when he unpicks Larkin's poems in his centenary year, and lets the language that entered the culture resonate as he goes about his own life as a poet ( ‘Sent out of sight/ Somewhere becoming rain.’, ‘It becomes still more difficult to find/ Words at once true and kind/ Or not untrue and not unkind.').

Larkin's poems still feel like contraband: saying the unsayable, facing the reality of time and its passing - whilst offering moments of astonishing beauty and transcendence.  Simon has lived with Larkin's work ever since he was told as a teenager that there was a real poet living in Yorkshire. He is fascinated by the way his poems are constructed; the way they often seem to tear things down, often exposing the truth of something difficult, and yet can also be freeing – the opposite of platitudes.

The poems Simon has chosen to explore (including ‘Aubade’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’)  show Larkin's range and achievement; they are poems that face the truth of relationships, of death, as well as poems of place and civic life like 'Bridge for the Living' (an unusual commission for Larkin which celebrates Hull as an 'Isolate city').

In this series Simon takes us to the places Larkin’s poems understood intimately – Coventry, and Hull – as he ‘roadtests’ different poems, to see what survives of them in 2022, especially when we know so much more about the private world of this complex and contradictory poet, than his first readers would have known. 


Episode one;
Simon Armitage explores Philip Larkin's poem 'Born Yesterday' - a poem written to celebrate the birth of a baby girl, and which suggests she might be happier if she can be dull.

Producer: Faith Lawrence
Mixed by: Sue Stonestreet

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Larkin Revisited

Born Yesterday

Genres

Brand

BBC Radio 4 FM

About BBC Radio 4