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 Excerpt
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 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
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.
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...
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
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 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...

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