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 Sort descending Excerpt
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...
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.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
From it Philip Larkin
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.
25
Karl Miller
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.
173
Rouen, April 26 - May 25, 1915 became MC 's best-known work...
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 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...
Intertextuality and Influence Wendy Cope
WC says she has been influenced by Gilbert and Sullivan (one of whose patter songs provides the template for At 70: Of fitness and vitality I am not the epitome) and by Philip Larkin
Literary responses Frances Cornford
The writer E. Nesbit particularly admired The Watch and wished, on her deathbed, that she had written it herself.
Briggs, Julia. A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924. Hutchinson.
392
Philip Larkin included both of these among the four of Cornford's poems that he chose...
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 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 ...
Literary responses T. S. Eliot
During TSE 's last years he reaped a rich harvest of public honours, both in Britain and internationally. Since then his standing as leading poet of the modernist movement and dominant figure of twentieth-century English...
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
Other influences she claimed are...
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...
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...
Occupation Frances Horovitz
Patrick Magee , Harvey Hall , Stevie Smith , Hugh Dickson , and Basil Jones were the other readers for the project. The poets from whose work they read included W. B. Yeats , D. H. Lawrence

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.