When The Less Deceived, Philip Larkin’s breakthrough collection of poems, first appeared in 1955, the poet was 33 years old, with two novels and The North Ship (1945) behind him. Few poets get the luxury of starting their careers twice. Yet readers sensed immediately that something new had arrived. Donald Davie hailed the book as ‘the most important novelty’ in British poetry ‘since the end of the war’, all the more remarkable, he thought, because Larkin avoided the usual ‘shock tactics’ of originality.

That novelty lay partly in Larkin’s diction. The language of poetry had never been so ‘aggressively down-played and down-market’, as A.E. Tolley put it later. Larkin refused to tidy up the texture of everyday life: he mentions washing-lines and Hall’s-Distemper boards, and dreams of following the fabled figure in ‘Poetry of Departures’ who ‘chucked up everything / And just cleared off’. Yet, as Donald Davie also noted, those same colloquialisms were in ‘novel and cunning harmony’ with ‘the lyric note’. Often, the lyricism is hidden inside the idiom itself, like the echo of ‘chucked up’ in ‘just cleared off’.

Reading the poems now, it is the lyricism that stands out and still surprises. Sometimes it seems as though the subjects Larkin writes about are merely placeholders for the poet’s deeper fascination with poetry, and its relationship with the passing of time: ‘how we feel now about you then’. Even the titles draw attention to their own transience: ‘Coming’, ‘Going’, ‘Arrivals, Departures’, ‘Whatever Happened?’. Larkin’s much-celebrated clarity isn’t quite what it seems, either: sense frequently yields to sound. It isn’t exactly clear what the final stanza of ‘Toads’ means when they talk about ‘spiritual truth’. What matters is that it feels right, those half-rhymes trapping us in a state of indecision:

For something sufficiently toad-like

Squats in me, too

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck

And cold as snow

And will never allow me to blarney

My way of getting

The fame and the girl and the money

All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other

One’s spiritual truth;

But I do say it’s hard to lose either,

When you have both.

What is said in The Less Deceived may be less important than who is saying it. Crucial to understanding the book’s appeal is that it marked the arrival of the recognisable ‘Larkin’ persona – that voice which, in Rachel Cooke’s words, knows at points ‘more about your life than you do yourself’. There is, as Davie also noted (with some distrust), an ‘appealing vulnerability’ to the poems, which achieve their intimacy by ‘an honest laying bare of the poet’s not always creditable feelings’. Larkin’s ‘not always creditable feelings’ are, by now, all too familiar: themes of death, self-disgust, misanthropy (‘Beyond all this, the wish to be alone’). Work and boredom, too: early reviews singled out both ‘Toads’ and ‘Poetry of Departures’.

What those same reviews often avoided – though it looks, 70 years on, like the collection’s overriding preoccupation – was Larkin’s frank, and often frankly hostile, attitude to sex and relationships. Even now, summaries tend to dwell on death, loss and diminishment, as though the collection’s sexual politics were marginal rather than central. Roy Fuller, writing in the London Magazine, was one of the few to notice it immediately: The Less Deceived contains an extraordinary number of ‘not exactly love poems’. Larkin himself suspected the book was ‘too sexy’ for one small Irish publisher, who turned it down.

That central focus is expressed with remarkable stylistic range: the grim symbolism of ‘Dry-Point’ and ‘Whatever Happened?’; the uneasy charm of ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’; the unsettlingly clinical portrayal of a sexual assault in ‘Deceptions’. The vocabulary is exact throughout, and often violent: dancers ‘maul’ to and fro; a ‘swivel eye’ ‘hungers from pose to pose’. We are miles away, here, from the abstract, idealised lovers of The North Ship, with their chaste kisses and anxious farewells.

The prevailing note is one of deep distrust. Love, as practised by men pursuing women, is reduced to sex, and sex is at best disappointing, at worst a form of harm (though poems like ‘Wedding-Wind’, with its naturalistic imagery, represent important, under-appreciated exceptions). Some of this is couched in universal terms (‘to think the lion’s share / Of happiness is found by couples / Sheer inaccuracy…’), but much of it is explicitly gendered. Male desire is shown as erratic, self-deceiving and inauthentic. It is also, in a poem like ‘Deceptions’, a permanent, inescapable stain, and one which the poet refuses to distance himself from.

If we frame Larkin’s arrival in 1955 as a reaction against the rhetorical excess of the 1940s, we miss the deeper rupture: poets have, after all, always tried to pull poetry closer to everyday life. But in subjecting male desire – which, for Larkin, usually stood in for desire itself – to such withering, ‘undeceived’ scrutiny, The Less Deceived was also putting several centuries of literature on trial (encouraged, as Larkin liked to admit, by Thomas Hardy’s example). This was a brave move on a number of levels: the same year the book was published, Larkin took up his post as University Librarian in Hull. In the poems’ explicitness about sex, combined with their deep cynicism about its worth, the book also stood at a strangely productive angle to its own era: anticipating the sexual liberalisation of the 1960s, while pre-emptively rejecting its promises of freedom. ‘Larkin’ had arrived.