Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. He was offered the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman, but declined the post. He spent his working life as a university librarian.

Life

Larkin was born to Sydney and Eva Larkin in Coventry, a provincial city in the English Midlands. He was educated at King Henry VIII School in Coventry, and St. John's College, Oxford, where 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 the 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, he became librarian at the University of Hull, a position in which he remained until his death. He never married, preferring to share his life with a number of women – Monica Jones (a fellow lecturer), Maeve Brennan (a library assistant) and Betty Mackereth (his secretary).

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 the colloquial 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 was a recurring theme and subject 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 one Whitsun. In 1972 he wrote the oft-quoted "Going, Going", a poem which reveals his increasing streak of romantic fatalism in his view of England in his later years – prophesising a complete destruction of the countryside and of a certain idealised idea of national togetherness and identity, it 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 represents a falling-off from his previous two bookssee for example, Andrew Swarbrick, Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995 (ISBN 0312125453), yet it contains a number of his most-loved pieces, including "This Be The Verse" and "The Explosion", as well as the title poem.

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 enflamed and polemical in his introduction to his collected jazz reviews, All What Jazz, 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, feeling that his poetic muse had permanently deserted him. Larkin died of oesophageal cancer, aged 63, and is buried at the Cottingham Municipal Cemetery near Hull.

Legacy

Larkin's posthumous reputation took a hit with the publication of Andrew Motion's A Writer's Life (1993) and an edition of his letters (1992), which revealed his obsessions with pornography, his racism, his increasingly extreme shift to the political right wing, and his habitual 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 television viewers. Media interest in Larkin has increased in the 21st century. His poem At Grass is featured in one Anthology booklet of the GCSE English exam, and Afternoons appears in another, Best Words. 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 2003, BBC TWO broadcast a play, titled Love Again, that dealt with the last 30 years of Larkin's life. The lead role was played by Hugh Bonneville. ^*

Bibliography

Poetry

The North Ship (1945)
XX Poems (1953)
The Fantasy Poets No. 21 (1954)
The Less Deceived (1955)
- "Church Going" (read)
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
- "The Whitsun Weddings" (read)
- "An Arundel Tomb" (read)
- "A Study of Reading Habits" (read)
- "Ambulances" (read)
- "Mr Bleaney"
High Windows (1974)
- "Homage to a Government (read)
- "This Be The Verse" (read)
- "Annus Mirabilis" (read)
- "The Explosion" (read)
Collected Poems 1938–83 (1988)
- "Aubade" (read) (first published 1977)
- "Party Politics" (read) (last published poem)

Fiction

Jill (1946), (ISBN 0879519614)
A Girl in Winter (1947), (ISBN 0879512172)
"Trouble at Willow Gables" and Other Fiction 1943–1953 (writing as "Brunette Coleman"), (ISBN 0571203477)

Nonfiction

Miscellaneous

The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (ed.) (1973)

Books about Larkin

A Writer's Life, Andrew Motion (1993). ISBN 057117065
Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, Anthony Thwaite, editor (1992). ISBN 057117048
The Philip Larkin I Knew, Maeve Brennan, Manchester University Press (2002). ISBN 0719062756
Philip Larkin and English Poetry, Terry Whalen, University of British Columbia Press (1986), ISBN 0774802324

Notes

External links

1922 births | 1985 deaths | British poets | Cancer deaths | Coventrians People of Irish descent in Great Britain