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 Barbara Pym
BP was the only living writer named as under-rated by two people, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil , in a list compiled by the Times Literary Supplement of the most over- and under-rated authors...
Health Barbara Pym
Her cancer was diagnosed early, a fact of which she was appreciative. In a letter to Philip Larkin two months after her operation she wrote that the tumour was luckily caught when very small so...
Friends, Associates Barbara Pym
In a letter to Philip Larkin , Pym remarked, Iris was much smaller than I imagined—I'd always thought of her as tall, but I seemed to tower above her (though only in height, of course)...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
The sales of this second novel nearly doubled those of Pym's first: Excellent Women sold 5,477 copies in the two months to June 1952, while Some Tame Gazelle sold only 3,722 in the thirteen years...
Publishing Barbara Pym
In a letter to Philip LarkinBP wrote that she felt she had been treated very badly by Cape , but that she was also not altogether surprised. For one thing she knew that other...
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...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
This became BP 's most widely-reviewed text, and received a mixed reception. Robert Liddell was again outraged, calling this a dreadful book which had only been made possible by the betrayal of Pym's friends in...
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...
Literary responses Kathleen Raine
When this book appeared, Philip Larkin called Raine's work vatic and universal.
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Its appearance offered an oppportunity for critics retrospectively to assess poetry from KR 's first four volumes. They praised her rare objectivity, clarity...
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, 1983.
20: 294
Philip Larkin included two of them, The World and Two Invocations of Death...
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
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...
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.
qtd. in
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, 1990.
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