A good deal has been written about how Philip Larkin “found his voice”, most memorably by the man himself; in his introduction to the 1966 reissue of his first collection The North Ship he describes how he applied a cooling Hardy-esque poultice to the Yeatsian “Celtic fever” that raged through his earliest published poems. Although this account oversimplifies things a good deal, and ignores the persistent influence of early models on the mature work, most people still accept the basic proposition: the trajectory of Larkin’s work is from highfalutin to demotic, from grand symbols to granular realities.
Much less has been said about how he found his voice in a different sense, and what the effect of this parallel development might have been. As a child Larkin stammered so badly that (again, he tells us this himself), he couldn’t even ask for a railway ticket when he went to the ticket office, but had to pass over a slip of paper with his destination written on it. Not surprisingly, his parents arranged for him to see a speech therapist, someone who eventually improved things by encouraging him to “swallow” his stammer. The effect was to make Larkin punctuate his conversation with occasional tense pauses which ended with a quick click of the tongue (he called it his “bushman’s click”); the sound is faintly and intermittently audible on the recordings he made of his own poems.
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