The Curse of Work

Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life? Philip Larkin asked this in 1954, just before he applied for, and got, the job of librarian at the University of Hull. His poem Toads appeared in a new poetry magazine called Listen and, despite its tiny circulation, he fretted that the university's appointments committee might have seen it. A year later, when the poem was reprinted in his collection The Less Deceived, he asked his publisher, the Marvell Press, not to promote the book around Hull – an especially unreasonable request given that the press was based in Hull.Larkin's fears were surely groundless. Toads reveals him to be what he was – a keen and efficient emptier of an in-tray. Like most of us, he needed the toad work to moor and shape his life. Work is a good thing in small doses, he wrote…