Not surprisingly, his parents arranged for him to see a speech therapist, someone who eventually improved things by encouraging him to “swallow” his stammer. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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