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 Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Carol Rumens
She discusses the poetry of Philip Larkin , Derek Mahon , and a range of women poets (including Adrienne Rich , Marilyn Hacker , and Ruth Padel ), especially their forms, music, and metres.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Seamus Heaney
He begins here with short pieces about his childhood reading and moves on through his development as a poet, paying tribute to Philip Hobsbaum as an influence. He puts forward the idea that his poetry...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Jennings
She includes poems for poets, artists, and thinkers: George Herbert , Charles Causley , Philip Larkin , J. M. W. Turner , Caravaggio , Chardin , Goya , Hume , and Descartes . A sequence...
Textual Production Barbara Pym
BP began keeping a diary in 1931. Her papers are archived at the Bodleian Library , Oxford University . (BP took her degree at St Hilda's College .) This material includes unpublished poems, short...
Textual Production Kate Clanchy
BBC Radio 3 broadcast readings and discussion by KC and working-class poet Paul Farley of poems by Philip Larkin based on train travel around Larkinland and conversation with some of its denizens.
“Children of the Whitsun Weddings”. BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature.
Textual Production L. T. Meade
LTM published A Sweet Girl-Graduate, whose title (originally from Tennyson 's The Princess) has been much used by other writers).
The words of the title have featured in a sentimental poem by Helen Steiner Rice
Textual Features Carol Shields
The poems in Others specialise in evocations of other people, often presented, as the titles of the poems acknowledge, not through an individual observer but through the self-confirming judgement of a couple or a group:...
Textual Features Wendy Cope
Yet the casual virtuosity of this poem is a kind of consolation. WC 's assets include the power of compression and the power of brevity, sometimes Larkin esque (as in the conclusion of Bloody Men...
Textual Features Alice Meynell
The Rainy Summer exemplifies her lively descriptions of landscape; it ends, Bees, humming in the storm, carry their cold / Wild honey to cold cells.
Larkin, Philip, editor. The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Clarendon Press.
34
Philip Larkin chose this poem (his only selection from...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Many poems here feature women answering back to canonical male voices: Liz Lochhead to Donne , Jenny Joseph to W. S. Gilbert , U. A. Fanthorpe to Walt Whitman , Wendy Cope to A. E. Housman
Textual Features Carol Rumens
Until We Could Hardly See Them imagines the dead calling from the roadway on any passers-by to notice them, to remember them, not caring if the living take offence and say their dead are being...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Critic Deryn Rees-Jones discerns widely varied influences on CAD 's work: mainstream English poets like Wordsworth , Robert Browning , T. S. Eliot , Auden , Dylan Thomas , Larkin , and Ted Hughes ...
Textual Features E. Nesbit
The title, condensed from two lines in Wordsworth 's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, alludes to the dimming and flattening of once-acute sensations. One of these poems says that Love can never be...
Textual Features Seamus Heaney
These pieces cover elders and friends (Larkin , Walcott , Patrick Kavanagh ), poets of Eastern Europe where poetry performs the service of resistance to political oppression (as it might do in Northern Ireland...
Textual Features Zadie Smith
Her subjects include George Eliot 's Middlemarch, Zora Neale Hurston , Franz Kafka , Vonnegut and Salinger as cult figures, Roland Barthes and Vladimir Nabokov (pitted against each other as attacker and booster of...

Timeline

14 January 1956: D. J. Enright's anthology Poets of the 1950s...

Writing climate item

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...

Women writers item

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...

Writing climate item

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...

Writing climate item

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.

Texts

Larkin, Philip. A Girl in Winter. Faber and Faber, 1947.
Larkin, Philip. All What Jazz: a record diary 1961-68. Faber and Faber, 1970.
Larkin, Philip. “Aubade”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 1491.
Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. Editor Thwaite, Anthony, Faber and Faber; the Marvell Press, 2003.
Larkin, Philip. High Windows. Faber and Faber, 1974.
Larkin, Philip, and Rodney Fitzgerald. Incidents from Phippy’s Schooldays. Editors Allen, Brenda and James Acheson, Juvenilia Press, 2002.
Larkin, Philip. “Introduction”. Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite, Faber and Faber; the Marvell Press, 2003, p. xi - xii.
Larkin, Philip. Jill. Fortune Press, 1946.
Larkin, Philip. Required Writing: miscellaneous pieces, 1955-1982. Faber and Faber, 1983.
Larkin, Philip. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940-1985. Editor Thwaite, Anthony, Faber and Faber, 1992.
Larkin, Philip. The Less Deceived. Marvel Press, 1955.
Larkin, Philip. The North Ship. Fortune Press, 1945.
Larkin, Philip, editor. The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Guild Publishing, 1984.
Larkin, Philip, editor. The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Clarendon Press, 1973.
Larkin, Philip. The Whitsun Weddings. Faber and Faber, 1964.
Larkin, Philip. XX Poems. Printed for the Author, 1951.