Philip Larkin, as well as his critics, has been almost entirely silent on potential connections between his poetry and the philosophy of Nietzsche. But this silence is not surprising for this “Movement” poet who cultivated an aesthetic of plainness and accessibility and a public persona that played down his real erudition. On closer inspection, his work not only has so many of the same preoccupations of Nietzsche—a materialist perspective, atheism, and pessimism—but also shows some direct borrowings from the philosopher. By examining selections of his poetry starting with The Less Deceived and culminating in a reading of “Aubade,” I will show Larkin as an übermensch of joy rather than as the death-obsessed curmudgeon he is so often viewed as. Largely, though not exclusively, focusing on The Birth of Tragedy, I find a Nietzschean arc of thought in Larkin’s poetry that moves from an attack on self-delusion, leading to pessimism, and then toward the overcoming of that pessimism through the joy found in human creation.