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
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...
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, p. vii - xv.
ix
The reader's...
Literary responses Evelyn Waugh
Most reviews were mocking in tone, in keeping with the late image of Waugh as a kind of Colonel Blimp. Philip Larkin wrote that to be one of his correspondents one would have to have...
Literary responses Evelyn Waugh
Yet at Waugh's death Larkin had written: It's very hard for me to imagine a world without Evelyn Waugh—he was one of the few really good living writers, & is a great loss.
Brennan, Maeve. The Philip Larkin I Knew. Manchester University Press.
186
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...
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:...
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...
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 et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
From this...
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 ,...
Reception E. J. Scovell
For a poet whose calm clarity, ordinariness, and reach towards the simple sublime seem to give her a kinship with Philip Larkin (without the cynicism), EJS is remarkably neglected. In 1990 the Feminist Companion quoted...
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.
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...
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 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
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.
20: 294
Philip Larkin included two of them, The World and Two Invocations of Death...

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.