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Philip Larkin
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Standard Name: Larkin, Philip
Birth Name: Philip Arthur Larkin
PL
is now widely regarded as one of the leading English poets of the later twentieth century. His output was small and his chosen form is brief, tightly structured, rhyming and self-contained, using a demotic vocabulary of deceptive simplicity. Though he often expresses brief, exuberant joy, he also returns again and again to the prospect of personal death, and the general tone of his poems is downbeat. He also published two novels as well as volumes of his reviews (of jazz and books), and other occasional prose writings.
Connections
| Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
|---|---|---|
| Anthologization | Dorothy Wellesley | Horses, having gone forward into Poems of Ten Years, 1924-1934, was selected by W. B. Yeats
for The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1935, and by Philip Larkin
for The Oxford Book... |
| Anthologization | Stella Benson | A note in the volume explains that it reprints the published contents of Twenty and adds only those poems which the author herself had selected for publication from her other works. |
| Anthologization | Kathleen Raine | These poems were written on the border between England and Scotland, or in Scotland itself, over a three-year period. Stanford, Donald E., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 20. Gale Research, 1983. 20: 294 |
| Anthologization | E. J. Scovell | This volume adds new poems to some reprinted. To the same year belongs her often-quoted comment: I should like the surface [of her poetry] to be entirely clear, and the meaning entirely implicit. Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990. |
| Anthologization | E. J. Scovell | EJS
has been much anthologised: in Geoffrey Grigson
's Poetry of the Present: An Anthology of the Thirties and After, 1949, and more recently in collections edited by Fleur Adcock
, Philip Larkin
,... |
| Friends, Associates | Elizabeth Jennings | She had a remarkably catholic talent for friendship. During her student days she became a friend of Philip Larkin
and Kingsley Amis
. Her correspondents at this and later periods of her life included her... |
| Friends, Associates | Barbara Pym | Philip Larkin
's letter to BP
expressing admiration for No Fond Return of Love began a lifelong correspondence of mutual critique and appreciation. Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press, 1994. 31 Pym, Barbara. A Very Private Eye. Holt, Hazel and Hilary PymEditors , Macmillan, 1984. 201, 291, 334 |
| Friends, Associates | Barbara Pym | In a letter to Philip Larkin
, Pym remarked, Iris was much smaller than I imagined—I'd always thought of her as tall, but I seemed to tower above her (though only in height, of course)... |
| Health | Barbara Pym | Her cancer was diagnosed early, a fact of which she was appreciative. In a letter to Philip Larkin
two months after her operation she wrote that the tumour was luckily caught when very small so... |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Dorothy Wellesley | Horses did a great deal to ensure DW
's continuing reputation. Yeats
particularly praised the lines on the wild grey asses fleet / With stripe from head to tail, and moderate ears. Yeats, W. B., and Dorothy Wellesley. “Introduction”. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley, Macmillan, 1936, p. vii - xv. ix |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Carol Shields | She took up poetry by a strangely roundabout route. Having noticed that in novels she read the female characters were hopelessly unlifelike, she was forcibly struck by an honest portrayal of a woman produced by... |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Wendy Cope | |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Christina Rossetti | CR
was mourned in a sonnet by Michael Field
shortly after her death. Her influence extended to many other poets of her own time or close to it, including Gerard Manley Hopkins
, Rosamund Marriott Watson |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Carol Rumens | The first item in the collection invokes Eugenio Montale
as a poet of the minute detail as well as the historical vision (which, says a reviewer, effectively describes her own practice). Philip Larkin
is also... |
| Intertextuality and Influence | U. A. Fanthorpe | UAF
was anthologized by Adrian Barlow
in Calling Kindred: Poems from the English Speaking World, 1993. At Poetry International 2000, she chose Robert Browning
as her Presiding Spirit. Connolly, Sally. “Woolly whispers of the past”. Times Literary Supplement, p. 25. 25 |
Timeline
14 January 1956
D. J. Enright
's anthologyPoets of the 1950s brought together work by eight poets generally taken to be leading voices in the recently-catagorized, modern but anti-modernist Movement.
1963
Jenny Joseph
published New Poems, 1963, which is famous for just one piece, the poem entitled Warning, which begins, When I am an old woman I shall wear purple.
June 1965
The poet Michael Horovitz
successfully brought poetry to a mass audience at the Albert Hall in London for a poetry festival evening of reading by Underground poets, jazz poets, Liverpool poets, and protest poets.
10 September 2003
Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of the Week a website entitled Poetry Landmarks of Britain: a map of poetic assocations plotted on an interactive map of Britain, searchable by region or category.