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
Textual Features Zadie Smith
Her subjects include George Eliot 's Middlemarch, Zora Neale Hurston , Franz Kafka , Vonnegut and Salinger as cult figures, Roland Barthes and Vladimir Nabokov (pitted against each other as attacker and booster of...
Textual Features Alice Meynell
The Rainy Summer exemplifies her lively descriptions of landscape; it ends, Bees, humming in the storm, carry their cold / Wild honey to cold cells.
Larkin, Philip, editor. The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Clarendon Press, 1973.
34
Philip Larkin chose this poem (his only selection from...
Textual Features Carol Shields
The poems in Others specialise in evocations of other people, often presented, as the titles of the poems acknowledge, not through an individual observer but through the self-confirming judgement of a couple or a group:...
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, 22 July 2010.
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 This material includes unpublished poems, short...
Textual Production L. T. Meade
LTM published A Sweet Girl-Graduate, whose title (originally from Tennyson 's The Princess) has been much used by other writers).
The words of the title have featured in a sentimental poem by Helen Steiner Rice
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.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Seamus Heaney
He begins here with short pieces about his childhood reading and moves on through his development as a poet, paying tribute to Philip Hobsbaum as an influence. He puts forward the idea that his poetry...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Jennings
She includes poems for poets, artists, and thinkers: George Herbert , Charles Causley , Philip Larkin , J. M. W. Turner , Caravaggio , Chardin , Goya , Hume , and Descartes . A sequence...

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