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
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 Alice Oswald
David Wheatley responded to this poem by establishing it as a landmark in the broadest literary landscape. He compared Oswald in some detail with Joyce (another writer much possessed by water). He rejoiced at her...
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, 1987.
392
Philip Larkin included both of these among the four of Cornford's poems that he chose...
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...
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...
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 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, 2002.
186
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 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
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
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...
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
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.
qtd. in
Connolly, Sally. “Woolly whispers of the past”. Times Literary Supplement, 13 Apr. 2001, p. 25.
25
Other influences she claimed are...
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.
qtd. in
Yeats, W. B., and Dorothy Wellesley. “Introduction”. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley, Macmillan, 1936, p. vii - xv.
ix
The reader's...
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...

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