Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Philip Larkin
-
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.
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...
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
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...
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
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...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jennings
She held bursaries or grants from the Arts Council
(after the initial one for her first book) in 1965, 1968, and 1972.
“Lauinger Library: Special Collections Division”. Georgetown University Library.
Some critics disparage EJ
's work along lines effectively summarized by Robert Crawford
Literary responses
Kathleen Raine
When this book appeared, Philip Larkin
called Raine's work vatic and universal.
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...
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...
During a career that spanned the greater part of the twentieth century, RP
published eighteen collections of poetry. She left letters and a journal, and occasionally spoke or wrote on literary topics. Her admirers have...
Author summary
Elizabeth Jennings
EJ
was a twentieth-century English poet writing on family, literary, and religious subjects. Peter Levi
calls her maybe the last poet of what may be called the soul.
The Ship. St Anne’s College.
92: 54
Early in her career she...
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
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
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.
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...