Results for Philip Larkin
On this page:
 
Biography:

Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was one of England's leading poets to emerge after World War II.

Philip Larkin was born August 9, 1922, the son of Sydney and Eva Emily Larkin. He spent his early years in Coventry, an industrial city in central England (heavily bombed during World War II). Larkin grew up during the 1930s and 1940s, which were marked by severe economic depression followed by the war. He attended the King Henry VIII School in Coventry, then went on to Oxford, from which he graduated in 1943 while the war was still in progress. A sensitive and introspective youth, his pre-university memories were of loneliness and passivity. His poem "I Remember, I Remember" recaptured the coldness of Larkin's Coventry: "'I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said./ 'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere."'

At Oxford, however, things began to look up. Larkin formed strong friendships with other young men, fellow students in St. John's College. Foremost among these were novelists-poets Kingsley Amis and John Wain, leaders of the "Angry Young Men," whose later fiction embodied some of the strong social protest held in check until the end of the war. Paradoxically, it was their conservatist tendencies in poetry which bound Larkin, most quiet of the three, to the others in an aesthetic which became known as "The Movement." The embodiment of this poetic manifesto was an anthology, New Lines (1956), edited by Robert Conquest. Other young poets, such as Thom Gunn and D. J. Enright, joined Larkin, Amis, and Wain here; the emphasis was on irony, precise description, specificity of detail - counteraction to the wartime poetry which this younger generation saw as emotionally overblown and technically sloppy.

Larkin, meanwhile, had other irons in the fire. Although he lamented the middle class work ethic ("Toads": "What should I let the toad work/squat on my life?"), he was never content with just one job. After Oxford he began a career as university librarian and served in this capacity in a number of institutions, including the University of Hull. Related to this expertise was valuable work Larkin performed as chairman of the National Manuscripts Collection of the Contemporary Writers Committee, 1972-1979.

Earlier, Larkin seems to have been in conflict over his main writing outlet - should it be fiction or poetry? His first novel, Jill, was published in 1946 (revised, 1964); A Girl in Winter appeared in 1947. Both novels are sensitive mood evocations of young people in wartime, judged by the critic M. L. Rosenthal to "illuminate the particular attitude of weary, tolerant irony" characteristic also of Larkin's poetry.

It was as a poet, however, that this writer was most striking, surpassed in his own land today only by Laureate Ted Hughes. The poems of Larkin's earliest period were collected in The North Ship (1945). This was followed by an international success, the volume entitled The Less Deceived, which appeared a decade later (reissued, 1960). Writing about these pieces, the American poet-critic Robert Lowell noted, "It's a homely, sophisticated language that mixes description with a personal voice. No post-war poetry has so caught the moment, and caught it without straining after ephemera." This volume contains two of Larkin's most admired poems, "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" and "Church Going." Both are personal monologues, musing nostalgically on the poet's favorite theme: loss - of time, of the certainty of religious belief; for, as Larkin wrote elsewhere (commenting on imaginative literature in general), "Happiness writes white." "Church Going" begins in a characteristically modest, understated way: "Once I am sure there's nothing going on/I step inside, letting the door thud shut./ … Hatless, I take off/My cycle-clips in awkward reverence."

The Whitsun Weddings, another collection of poems, appeared in 1964. Here, in "Send No Money," Larkin describes himself as an observer, not an active participant in life. Acute, witty observation is a hallmark of Larkin's later volume of poetry, High Windows (1974). The personal, reticently confessional voice is ever-present, a bit more open here in the aftermath of a generation of sexual revolution: "Sexual intercourse began/ … (Though just too late for me)/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles' first LP" ("Annus Mirabilis"). The deep-seated pessimism is almost always redeemed and transmuted by Larkin wit: "Man hands on misery to man./It deepens like a coastal shelf./Get out as early as you can,/And don't have any kids yourself. ("This Be The Verse").

Happily, despite this literary gloom, Larkin's later life seems to have been blessed with warm personal relationships as well as mounting professional acclaim. With another writer, Lord David Cecil, Larkin was centrally responsible for the resurrection of the novelist Barbara Pym's career. After she had been unable for years to get a publisher for her seventh novel, Pym was named by the two men one of the most under-rated 20th-century novelists (in response to a Times Literary Supplement questionnaire, 1977). Pym, rediscovered, published three more novels; she and Larkin remained friends until her death in 1980. Recognition of Larkin's concern for his profession was officially demonstrated by membership on the Literary Panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain (1980-1982). Foreign honors included election to the America Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975).

Two other interests of this writer deserve mention: Larkin was jazz correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, 1961-1971; he also edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse (1973), in which the poetry selected clearly emphasizes Larkin's "Movement" beliefs.

Further Reading

Larkin's jazz criticism is collected in the book of essays All What Jazz (1970). The poet commenting on his own work is revealed in his introduction to the revised North Ship (1966). An example of the structural linguistic approach to Larkin's poetry (by J. McH. Sinclair) is to be found in Essays on Style and Language (1966), edited by Roger Fowler. M. L. Rosenthal provides a detailed analysis of Larkin's poetry in his The New Poets (1967).

 
 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Philip Arthur Larkin

(born Aug. 9, 1922, Coventry, Warwickshire, Eng. — died Dec. 2, 1985, Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire) English poet. Educated at Oxford, Larkin became a librarian at the University of Hull, Yorkshire, in 1955; he would remain a librarian the rest of his life. He wrote two novels before becoming well known with his third volume of verse, The Less Deceived (1955), which expressed the antiromantic sensibility prevalent in English verse of his time. Later poetry volumes are The Whitsun Weddings (1964), High Windows (1974), and Aubade (1980). All What Jazz (1970) contains essays he wrote as a jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph (1961 – 71).

For more information on Philip Arthur Larkin, visit Britannica.com.

 
British History: Philip Larkin

Larkin, Philip (1922-85). Poet, librarian, novelist, and, it has been said, ‘unofficial laureate of post-1945 England’. The discovery of Hardy's poems helped him find his own distinctive voice, first heard in The Less Deceived (1956). With the responsibility for a large university library at Hull, writing was pushed to the margins and only two more collections followed: The Whitsun Weddings(1964) and High Windows (1974). A reclusive figure, he alternated between self-deprecation and self-dislike.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Larkin, Philip,
1922–85, English poet. He graduated from St. John's College, Oxford (B.A., 1943; M.A., 1947) and was for many years librarian at the Univ. of Hull. With an eye for the ordinary and a diction that is profoundly lucid and determinedly plain, Larkin wrote poetry of diminution that quietly exposes the weakness and pretensions of English life. His wit was subtle, delicate, and deadly. Among his volumes of poetry are The North Ship (1946), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974). Larkin also edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973). In addition, he published two novels, Jill (1940) and A Girl in Winter (1947); and two collections of critical pieces, All What Jazz: A Record Diary, 1961–1968 (1970) and Required Writing (1983). With the onset of deafness in the 1970s Larkin ceased writing poetry and jazz criticism. Despite a slim body of mature work, Larkin has a secure reputation as one of the finest and most original poets of his era.

Bibliography

See his Complete Poems (1988, rev. ed. 2004); A. Thwaite, ed., Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985 (1992); memoir by M. Brennan (2002); biography by A. Motion (1993); studies by L. Kuby (1974), T. Whalen (1986), R. Day (1987), L. Cookson and B. Loughrey, ed. (1989), D. Salwak, ed. (1989), J. Booth (1992), A. Swarbrick (1995), S. Regan, ed. (1997), and J. Booth, ed. (2000).

 
Quotes By: Philip Larkin

Quotes:

"Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name."

"Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it."

"Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself."

"Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me) -- Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP."

"Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off?"

"Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up."

See more famous quotes by Philip Larkin

 
Wikipedia: Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin,
CH CBE
Born August 9 1922(1922--)
Flag of England Coventry, Warwickshire, UK
Died December 2 1985 (aged 63)
Hull, Humberside, UK
Nationality English
Occupation Poet, Novelist, Jazz critic, Poet Laureate (declined)

Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL, (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He spent his working life as a university librarian and was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. Larkin is commonly regarded as one of the greatest English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. In 2003 Larkin was chosen as the "nation's best-loved poet" in a survey by the Poetry Book Society [1].

Larkin was born in Coventry, the only son and younger child of Sydney Larkin (1884–1948), city treasurer of Coventry, who came from Lichfield, and his wife, Eva Emily Day (1886–1977), of Epping. From 1930 to 1940 he was educated at King Henry VIII School in Coventry, and in October 1940 went up to St John's College, Oxford to read English language and literature, taking a first-class degree in 1943. Unlike many of his contemporaries during the Second World War, he took the full-length, unbroken degree course, having been rejected for military service because of his bad eyesight. At Oxford he met Kingsley Amis, a lifelong friend and frequent correspondent. In late 1943, soon after graduating from Oxford, he applied for, and was appointed to, the position of municipal librarian at Wellington, Shropshire. In 1946, he became assistant librarian at University College, Leicester (Kingsley Amis got his idea for Lucky Jim on visiting Larkin and seeing the common room of Leicester University). In March 1955, Larkin became librarian at the University of Hull, a position he retained until his death.

Career

Larkin's early work shows the influence of Yeats, but his later poetic identity was influenced mainly by Thomas Hardy. He is well known for his use of colloquial language in his poetry, partly balanced by a similarly antique word choice. With fine use of enjambement and rhyme, his poetry is highly structured, but never rigid. Death and fatalism were recurring themes and subjects of his poetry; "Aubade" being an example of this. The Less Deceived, published in 1955, marked Larkin as an up-and-coming poet. He was for a time associated with "The Movement".

The publication of The Whitsun Weddings in 1964 confirmed his reputation. The title poem is a masterly depiction of England seen from a train on Whitsun. In 1972 he wrote the oft-quoted "Going, Going", a poem which expresses the romantic fatalism in his view of England which was typical of his later years. In it, he prophesies a complete destruction of the countryside, and expresses an idealised sense of national togetherness and identity. The poem ends with the doom-laden statement, "I just think it will happen, soon". High Windows, his last book, was released in 1974; for some critics it represented a falling-off from his previous two books,[1] yet it contains a number of his much-loved pieces, including "This Be The Verse" and "The Explosion", as well as the title poem. "Annus Mirabilis" (year of wonder), also from that volume, contains the frequently quoted observation that sexual intercourse began in 1963 ("rather late for me").

Besides poetry, Larkin published two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and several essays. Larkin was also a major contributor to the re-evaluation of the poetry of Thomas Hardy, which had been ignored in comparison to his work as a novelist. Hardy received the longest selection in Larkin's idiosyncratic and controversial anthology, The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973).

Larkin was by contrast a notable critic of modernism in contemporary art and literature; his scepticism is at its most nuanced and illuminating in Required Writing, a collection of his book reviews and essays; it is at its most inflamed and polemical in his introduction to his collected jazz reviews, All What Jazz, 126 record-review columns he wrote for the Daily Telegraph between 1961 and 1971, which contains an attack on modern jazz that widens into a wholesale critique of modernism in the arts.

On the death of John Betjeman, Larkin was offered the post of Poet Laureate, but declined it. Larkin, who never married, died of oesophageal cancer, aged 63, and is buried at the Cottingham Municipal Cemetery near Hull.

Larkin's career-long companion and muse was the academic Monica Jones. She and Larkin had a holiday cottage at Haydon Bridge where they spent many summers together.

Legacy

Larkin's posthumous reputation was affected by the publication of Andrew Motion's (1993) and an edition of his letters (1992), which revealed his obsessions with pornography, his racism, his increasing shift to the political right wing, and his habitual expressions of venom and spleen. These revelations have been dismissed by the author and critic Martin Amis (son of Kingsley Amis), who argues that the letters in particular show nothing more than a tendency for Larkin to tailor his words according to the recipient, rather than representing Larkin's true opinions.

Despite controversy about his personal life and opinions, he remains one of Britain's most popular poets; three of his poems, "This Be The Verse", "The Whitsun Weddings" and "An Arundel Tomb", featured in the "Nation's Top 100 Poems" as voted for by viewers of the BBC's Bookworm in 1995 [2]. Media interest in Larkin has increased in the twenty-first century. His poem At Grass is featured in one Anthology booklet of the GCSE English exam, and Afternoons appears in another, Best Words. Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings collection is one of the available poetry texts in the AQA English Literature A Level syllabus, whilst High Windows is offered by the OCR board and An Arundel Tomb in the Edexcel board Poetry Anthology. The Larkin Society was formed in 1995, ten years after the poet's death; its president is Anthony Thwaite, one of Larkin's literary executors.

In 1964 Larkin was interviewed by Sir John Betjeman for the BBC programme [3]. The film, together with the original rushes, is stored the Larkin archive at the University of Hull [4].

Larkin was the subject of the South Bank Show in 1982 [5]. Larkin did not appear on camera although Melvyn Bragg, in his introduction to the programme, stressed the poet had given his full cooperation. The programme featured contributions from Kingsley Amis, Andrew Motion and Alan Bennett. Bennett read several of Larkin's works on an edition of "Poetry in Motion", broadcast by Channel 4 in 1990 [6].

In his acclaimed play The History Boys Bennett would quote from Larkin's "MCMXIV" and the character of the Headmaster, a geography graduate from Hull, referred to Larkin as 'the Himmler of the accessions desk' [7].

In 1999, Oliver Ford Davies starred in Ben Brown's play Larkin With Women at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, reprising his role at the Orange Tree Theatre, London, in 2006. The play was published by Larkin's own publishers, Faber.

In 2002 Sir Tom Courtenay debuted [8] his one-man play Pretending to Be Me at the West Yorkshire Playhouse [9] before transferring the production to the Comedy Theatre in London's West End. An audio recording of the play, which is based on Larkin's letters, interviews, diaries and verse, was released in 2005 [10].

In 2003, BBC Two broadcast a play, titled Love Again, that dealt with the last thirty years of Larkin's life. The lead role was played by Hugh Bonneville [11] and in the same year Channel 4 broadcast the documentary Philip Larkin, Love and Death in Hull [12].

After lying undiscovered in a Hornsea garage for over two decades, an unprecedented collection of Larkin audio tapes were found in 2006. The recordings were made by the poet in the early 1980s [13]. Extracts can be heard during a Sky News report [14].

Bibliography

Poetry

Fiction

  • Jill (1946) ISBN 0-87951-961-4
  • A Girl in Winter (1947) ISBN 0-87951-217-2
  • "Trouble at Willow Gables" and Other Fiction 1943–1953 (writing as "Brunette Coleman") ISBN 0-571-20347-7

Non-fiction

  • Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955 – 1982 (1983)
  • Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews 1952 – 1985
  • Brynmor Jones Library, 1929-79 (1979) ISBN 0-8595-8538-7

Miscellaneous

Books about Larkin

  • , Andrew Motion (1993) ISBN 0-571-17065-X
  • Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, Anthony Thwaite editor (1992) ISBN 0-571-17048-X
  • The Philip Larkin I Knew, Maeve Brennan, Manchester University Press (2002) ISBN 0-7190-6275-6
  • Philip Larkin and English Poetry, Terry Whalen, University of British Columbia Press (1986) ISBN 0-7748-0232-4
  • Pretending to be Me: Phillip Larkin, a portrait, Tom Courtenay (2005) ISBN 1-4055-0082-4
  • , James Booth (2005) ISBN 1-4039-1834-1
  • First Boredom Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin, Richard Bradford (2006) ISBN 0-7206-1147-4

Notes

  1. ^ see for example, Andrew Swarbrick, Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995 (ISBN 0-312-12545-3)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 

Join the WikiAnswers Q&A community. Post a question or answer questions about "Philip Larkin" at WikiAnswers.

 

Copyrights:

Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Philip Larkin".  Read more

Search for answers directly from your browser with the FREE Answers.com Toolbar!  
Click here to download now. 

Get Answers your way! Check out all our free tools and products.

On this page:   E-mail   print Print  Link  

 

Keep Reading

Mentioned In:

 |  More >More >
 

Do you have the answers?