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.
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...
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
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...
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.
Yeats, W. B., and Dorothy Wellesley. “Introduction”. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley, Macmillan, 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...
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
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
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...
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...
