Philip Larkin's Complete Poems, Edited by Archie Burnett "Deprivation is for me," Philip Larkin once observed, "what daffodils were for Wordsworth." He was right, of course: unhappiness, loss, disappointment, boredom and fear of death are the bread and butter of his verse. Larkin was the Eeyore of poets, the Debbie Downer of modern literature. The familiar T-shirt - "Life's a Bitch and Then You Die" - pretty much sums up the central theme of his work. Of course, Larkin (1922-85) was also a poetic genius. Though he will never be as popular in the United States as he is in Britain (where he's still regarded as a kind of poet laureate), his finest poems, like "Aubade" - a harrowing meditation on death and the human condition - deserve the broadest possible audience here. The musicality of his verse, his ability to address the most metaphysical of subjects in the most vernacular of tones, his acerbic sense of the absurd - all serve to make him one of the most bracing and unforgettable voices in postwar poetry. Many American readers know Larkin chiefly from his more darkly funny lines: "Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/ (Which was rather late for me) - /Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban/And the Beatles" first LP" (from "Annus Mirabilis"). Or: They mess you up, "your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you" (from "This Be The Verse"). Unfortunately, "The Complete Poems," which seems to include every scrap of verse Larkin ever wrote, is unlikely to give the casual reader a broader appreciation of his work, as it dilutes his achievement with disposable juvenilia, unpublished verses, even oddments salvaged from letters and Christmas cards. "No power cuts here - /Lots of good cheer!" Larkin, a librarian by profession, was strict about what he published, and even then was often extremely tough on himself. He denounced the "shouting mediocrity" of three-quarters of the poems that he published in an early private booklet, dismissing the verses as "hopeless old friends whom you know will never get a job." And he impugned a version of "The Trees" - which, uncharacteristically, addressed the possibility of renewal - as "bloody awful tripe." Filling out this volume, and taking up more space than the verse, is extended commentary on the poems by Archie Burnett, a professor of English at Boston University and editor of the Oxford editions of A. E. Housman's poems and letters. Mr. Burnett's tireless tracking down of bits and pieces of Larkin's work and his erudite annotations are an impressive act of scholarship. But while this volume certainly belongs in university libraries - providing an amazingly detailed map of Larkin's development as an artist - it will strike nonacademic readers as a form of overkill. Most readers will be far happier with "Collected Poems," edited by Anthony Thwaite, or a collection selected by Martin Amis. Many of the early verses in this complete volume show Larkin's struggle to find a voice of his own; they reverberate with echoes of Yeats, Auden and Eliot. Some lesser poems feature lines that teeter on the precipice of bluntness and cliché: "You're contrary/You are the misfit/All along/Though you don't think it/You are wrong." And others, like "The Dance," feel verbose and in need of a judicious edit, in sharp contrast to the concise precision of Larkin's more memorable work. A number of Larkin's better-known poems create a somber portrait of a postwar England of diminished expectations, urban sprawl and deadening routine - a "rented world" of "cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,/Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers - /A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling/Where only salesmen and relations come." Here, "bleak high-risers" are replacing the old English countryside of meadows and lanes, and "greeds/And garbage are too thick-strewn/To be swept up now." It's a landscape that mirrors the bleak outlook of the people in Larkin's verse. What all the poems have in common - the apprenticelike ones, the discarded ones and the ones that have become classics - is a preoccupation with absence and negativity. In Larkin-land it's often 4 in the morning, when fears and anxieties metastasize. Cold and darkness hold sway here: day gives way to night, summer to autumn, youth and beauty to illness and death, that "anaesthetic from which none come round." Again and again, the gap between expectation and reality is italicized. Love turns to dust or disappointment. Relationships explode or fade. And the many curmudgeonly protagonists in these poems ("I was too selfish, withdrawn/And easily bored to love") inevitably find themselves alone and alienated from the world. "Life is first boredom," Larkin wrote, "then fear." Youth is evanescent and wasted on the young, and the infirmities of age are a harbinger of worse to come: "These are the first signs: Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power/Of choosing gone." Annihilation always looms and "no trick dispels" the fear of oblivion, though "Religion used to try,/That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die." Read one after the next in this huge, overstuffed volume, Larkin's poems can leave the reader feeling suffocated by his willful gloom. Even the most pleasant or benign events can send his narrators into paroxysms of misanthropy or despondency. A glimpse of puppies leads to an image of children burying the once "living toys," their novelty now expired, with a shovel and a shoebox. And mowing the lawn results in a hedgehog's getting stuck in the mower blades, and this melancholy meditation: "The first day after a death, the new absence/Is always the same; we should be careful/Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time." No one, however, writes more powerfully than Larkin at his best about mortality and the ticking clock. In his masterpiece, "Aubade," he describes the inevitable fate that awaits us all: "the total emptiness for ever,/The sure extinction that we travel to/And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,/Not to be anywhere,/And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.