Many lovers of Philip Larkin’s poetry were surprised to hear yesterday, via the BBC, that a new poem and a trove of unpublished work by the poet had been discovered. But no one was more surprised than scholar Trevor Tolley. This is because Mr. Tolley brought these early works to light more than two years ago, in 2001.

The “new”poem is about the death of the poet’s father, an event that was very significant in Larkin’s life and in his poetry. According to Mr.Tolley, it was written around the time as, and perhaps as a companion to,the poem “April Sunday Brings the Snow,” circa 1948. Mr. Tolley said he discovered the poem in a set of loose pages that Larkin had at one time actually torn from a workbook. In 2001, Mr. Tolley wrote an article about these “Lost Pages,” which was printed in the periodical “About Larkin.”

The work came to light – again – August 7, when another Larkin scholar, Don Lee, told attendees at the Philip Larkin Birthday Walk in Leicester,England, about these new pages and read the new poem, which does not have a title, but which Mr. Lee called “And Yet.” On Tuesday, Mr. Lee read it again, this time on the BBC’s Radio 4.

While Mr. Lee did credit Mr. Tolley with finding the poem, he didn’t mention that it had appeared in Mr.Tolley’s article of three years ago or that he and other Larkin scholars have known about these pages for years.

Mr.Tolley, who has written two books about Larkin, lives in Ottawa, Canada, and had not heard about the coverage the poem was receiving in England. He said that he will not be including the poem in the collection he is currently editing, “Early Poems by Philip Larkin,” which will include some 250 unpublished poems and is scheduled for release in England by Faber this fall. He is not convinced that it is a completed poem. But he has put it in the introduction to the book.

According to Mr. Tolley, this poem is important because it provides evidence of Larkin’s earliest vestiges of an individual style. “It seems to me that at the time he wrote that poem,he was writing very little,” he said. “He’d been a great admirer of Yeats for some years and he’d stopped writing in that sort of manner, and you can see that this time he’s really moving toward finding his own voice. It seems to me the father’s death gave him an event which had an emotional immediacy which he focused on very directly, but not thinking about writing a great poem or anything else. He focused his eye not on poetry, but on the feeling he was grappling with.”