Haul of rare Larkin poems found

Larkin's unpublished poem And Yet deals with the death of his father

Hundreds of unpublished works by celebrated poet Philip Larkin have been discovered in his home city Hull.

The poems were found in library archives by Trevor Tolley, a member of the Philip Larkin Society, as he researched the poet's early work.

The works include And Yet, a 1948 poem written by Larkin soon after the death of his father.

"This is going to amaze people," society committee member Donald Lee told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Schoolgirl pastiche

A total of 250 pages of poems have been discovered, which were written by Larkin when he worked as a librarian in Leicester.

Although Larkin is known for dour poems such as Ambulances, the find included "funny ones, not just serious ones".

It also featured "schoolgirl poems" - boarding school pastiches which Larkin wrote under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman - including a work called Mary Cox in Cotton Socks.

Larkin was devastated by the death of his father, and And Yet was thought to have been the last poem he wrote for a long period.

"After this point he was virtually silent for about a year," said Mr Lee.

"He wrote nothing we have found anyway - we are finding things all the time."

Larkin, who died in 1985 aged 63, was chosen as the nation's best-loved poet of the last 50 years in a 2003 survey by the Poetry Book Society.