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
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...
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...
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 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...
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
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...
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...

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