The Times Literary Supplement has removed from its website a poem that it claimed was an unpublished piece by Philip Larkin, after it emerged that it is most likely the work of a lesser-known Hull poet, Frank Redpath.
The TLS has also taken down an accompanying 1,600-word essay on what it portrayed as an exciting new discovery from one of Britain’s most revered 20th-century poets.
“New details have recently come to light. We’ll be publishing the full story later on this week,” the TLS told Buzzfeed, which first reported the blunder.
‘In and Out’: An unpublished poem by Philip Larkin http://t.co/YIZZLdu5Ov pic.twitter.com/4HErHPoJDd
— TheTLS (@TheTLS) May 25, 2015
The removed article, a cached version of which is still available online, said a photocopied sheet had been discovered in two halves in one of Larkin’s workbooks.
“Larkin clearly did not consider the poem worthy of publication; but nor did he destroy it entirely, and since Xerox was only widely available from 1959, he seems also to have wanted to preserve it some years after it was most probably written,” it said. “The text, however, speaks unambiguously for itself,” wrote the article’s author, Tom Cook. “There are striking similarities to work before and after the probable period of its composition: it not only shows where Larkin had come from, but where he was going next.
“It is the third and fourth stanzas of ‘In and Out’ which most strongly produce the emotional and linguistic thrill associated with Larkin’s later, fully achieved works … And who but Larkin could create pathos from a dying fire that ‘has lasted, against the odds, all the time [its makers] slept’, or give such moodily authoritative closure to these wary affirmations in three words: ‘Simple lessons, then’?”
Soon after the article was published, reader Rhiannon Beeson commented on Facebook: “In and Out isn’t a poem by Philip Larkin but by another Hull poet, Frank Redpath. The poem was included in the 1982 anthology A Rumoured City, to which Larkins contributed a foreword. The poem was then gathered up in Frank’s first book To The Village with an introduction to Douglas Dunn.”
Having been alerted to a possible mistake, Twitter users looked up the anthology using Google Books. In its introduction Redpath is described as having “distinctly Larkin-esque habits of expression”.
Others on Twitter saw the funny side of the mistake.
This unpublished Larkin poem is, I must say, quite magnificent: pic.twitter.com/WaWWWADFwH
— David Whitley (@mrdavidwhitley) May 26, 2015
This undated lost Larkin poem shows him in a more pastoral mood: pic.twitter.com/07UMPrU1Fe
— Generalissimo Twll (@twlldun) May 26, 2015
What I admire most is the way Larkin bravely repeats the opening two lines, to bring thematic conclusion to it. Magic pic.twitter.com/gXWzEiJNXD
— ...and the frog dies (@loveandgarbage) May 26, 2015
