Philip Larkin was one of the most admired and loved English poets of the twentieth century. His Collected Poems has become essential reading on any bookshelf, covering his four published volumes and late work. But Larkin was a prolific writer in his youth, and wrote over two hundred and fifty poems in the years leading up to his first collection. Drawing on the pamphlets, manuscripts and workbooks from 1938 to 1946-46, the Early Poems reveals, for the first time, the formative writings and literary origins of this most gifted of poets.