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.
Statue of Philip Larkin by Martin Jennings at Hull Paragon railway station in Yorkshire, unveiled 2 December 2010. Larkin is mid stride, holding a book under one arm and a hat in his other hand.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Reception Elizabeth Jennings
Delay became a popular poem. It was selected twenty years after publication, by Philip Larkin , for The New Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse, and years later again to appear among the advertising placards...
Reception Patricia Beer
Reviewers were again appreciative, and many recognised several sides to PB : oddity as well as cleverness and elegance, risk-taking as well as delicacy and astringency. Martin Dodsworth , however, sounded a warning note about...
Reception Barbara Pym
When An Unsuitable Attachment was finally published (posthumously), Larkin remarked that it was richly redolent of her unique talent, despite some aspects of the text that were not fully done.
qtd. in
Allen, Orphia Jane. Barbara Pym: Writing a Life. Scarecrow Press, 1994.
34
Meanwhile in September...
Reception Caroline Blackwood
This was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Philip Larkin (a member of the jury) voted against it on the grounds that it was memoir rather than fiction, and it did not win.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Schoenberger, Nancy. Dangerous Muse, A Life of Caroline Blackwood. Phoenix, 2002.
25
Karl Miller
Reception Susan Miles
The Times Literary Supplement said that Little Mirrors would move the reader not by any particular charm in the clear and modestly modern verse, but by SM 's point of view, her quick observation...
Reception May Cannan
MC wrote, It mattered to me . . . what Q thought of my poems more than anyone except my father .
Cannan, May, and Bevil Quiller-Couch. The Tears of War. Editor Fyfe, Charlotte, Cavalier Books, 2000.
173
Rouen, April 26 - May 25, 1915 became MC 's best-known work...
Reception Iris Murdoch
It is not clear why Philip Larkin and Monica Jones chose a copy of this novel for systematically defacing every page with childishly salacious alterations and insertions (lips were parted, for instance, became...
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...
Reception Ruth Pitter
During her lifetime RP was deeply appreciated by some readers. C. S. Lewis scatters through his letters such remarks as Whenever I re-read your poems, I blame myself for not re-reading them oftener.
King, Don W. “The Anatomy of a Friendship: the correspondence of Ruth Pitter and C. S. Lewis, 1946-1962: Mythlore, Summer 2003”. Findarticles.
2
Arthur Russell
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 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, 1973.
34
Philip Larkin chose this poem (his only selection from...
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 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 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 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...

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