Philip Larkin

thumb|right|I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals. Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist and librarian. Quotes What was the rock my gliding childhood struck, And what bright unreal path has led me here? Lines from an early poem, letter to J. B. Sutton (16 April 1941) Poetry = heightened talking. Novel = heightened story. Painting = heightened seeing. Letter (23 May 1941) My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That's what you get for not dying, you see. Letter to Kingsley Amis (24 October 1947) Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd. Letter to J. B. Sutton (21 December 1942) I search myself for illusions like a monkey looking for fleas. Letter (13 July 1949) If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first. Letter to J. B. Sutton (30 October 1949) I am beginning to think of the creative imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds. Letter (26 February 1950) I think ... someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what's more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn't. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. It's like rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There's no way of quietly enjoying rugby football. Letter to Monica Jones (1 November 1951), as quoted by Martin Amis, "Philip Larkin's women", The Guardian (23 October 2010) You know I don’t care at all for politics, intelligently. I found that at school when we argued all we did was repeat the stuff we had, respectively, learnt from the Worker, the Herald, Peace News, the Right Book Club (that was me, incidentally: I knew these dictators, Marching Spain, I can remember them now) and as they all contradicted each other all we did was get annoyed. I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, & therefore I abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation. It’s true that the writers I grew up to admire were either non-political or Left-wing, & that I couldn’t find any Right-wing writer worthy of respect, but of course most of the ones I admired were awful fools or somewhat fakey, so I don’t know if my prejudice for the Left takes its origin there or not. But if you annoy me by speaking your mind in the other interest, it’s not because I feel sacred things are being mocked but because I can’t reply, not (as usual) knowing enough. ... By the way, of course I’m terribly conventional, by necessity! Anyone afraid to say boo to a goose is conventional. Letter to Monica Jones, from Belfast (5 August 1953) To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted. Letter to Winifred Arnott (7 October 1953) Marriage, well. I think of it as a marvellous thing for other people, like going to the stake. Letter (2 March 1965) You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train. Letter to Monica Jones (22 October 1967) I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals. Interview in The Review, published by Ian Hamilton (1972) thumb|right|The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. "Aubade", st. 2, in The Times Literary Supplement (23 December 1977) Postmen like doctors go from house to house. "Aubade", st. 5 The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be carefulOf each other, we should be kind While there is still time. "The Mower", Humberside (Hull Literary Club magazine) (Autumn 1979) [12 June 1979] Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. Interview with Miriam Gross, "A voice for our time" in The Observer (16 December 1979); republished in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955–1982 (1983) Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form. Required Writing (1983) The Less Deceived (1955) But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards. "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" And I, whose childhoodIs a forgotten boredom,Feel like a childWho comes on a sceneOf adult reconciling,And can understand nothingBut the unusual laughter,And starts to be happy. "Coming" Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break. "Next, Please"    Some brass and stuff Up at the holy end. "Church Going"    Hatless, I take offMy cycle-clips in awkward reverence. "Church Going" Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique. "Church Going" But superstition, like belief, must die,And what remains when disbelief has gone? "Church Going" A serious house on serious earth it is,In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,Are recognised, and robed as destinies. "Church Going" Nothing, like something, happens anywhere. "I Remember, I Remember" 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?Six days of the week it soils  With its sickening poison—Just for paying a few bills!  That’s out of proportion. "Toads", sts. 1-2 Their nippers have got bare feet,   Their unspeakable wivesAre skinny as whippets—and yet   No one actually starves. "Toads", st. 5 The Whitsun Weddings (1964) thumb|right|Get stewed:Books are a load of crap. What are days for?Days are where we live.They come, they wake usTime and time over.They are to be happy in:Where can we live but days? "Days" [1953] Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon, and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love. "An Arundel Tomb" [20 February 1956] The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,   Broke out, to showIts bright incipience sailing above,Still promising to solve, and satisfy,And set unchangeably in order. So   To pile them back, to cry,Was hard, without lamely admitting howIt had not done so then, and could not now. "Love Songs in Age" [1 January 1957] Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,Shaped to the comfort of the last to goAs if to win them back. "Home Is so Sad" [1958] Don’t read too much now: the dudeWho lets the girl down beforeThe hero arrives, the chapWho’s yellow and keeps the store,Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:Books are a load of crap. "A Study of Reading Habits" [20 August 1960] Talking in bed ought to be easiest,Lying together there goes back so far,An emblem of two people being honest. "Talking in Bed" [1960] thumb|Never such innocence again. Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word — the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriages,Lasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again. "MCMXIV" Life is first boredom, then fear.Whether or not we use it, it goes,And leaves what something hidden from us chose,And age, and then the only end of age. "Dockery and Son" Give me your arm, old toad;Help me down Cemetery Road. "Toads Revisited" I thought of London spread out in the sun, Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat. "The Whitsun Weddings" High Windows (1974) The hardness and the brightness and the plainFar-reaching singleness of that wide stareIs a reminder of the strength and painOf being young; that it can't come again,But is for others undiminished somewhere. "Sad Steps", sts. 5 and 6 [1968] They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   They may not mean to, but they do.They fill you with the faults they had   And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn   By fools in old-style hats and coats,Who half the time were soppy-stern   And half at one another's throats. 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" [c. April 1971] Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three(Which was rather late for me)—Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles’ first LP "Annus Mirabilis" Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. "High Windows" Next year we are to bring the soldiers homeFor lack of money, and it is all right.Places they guarded, or kept orderly,Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly. "Homage to a Government" Next year we shall be living in a countryThat brought its soldiers home for lack of money.The statues will be standing in the sameTree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.Our children will not know it’s a different country.All we can hope to leave them now is money. "Homage to a Government" Perhaps being old is having lighted roomsInside your head, and people in them, acting.People you know, yet can't quite name. "The Old Fools" Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?I am all you never had of goods and sex.You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’ "Money", st. 1 The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said;The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born againAnd we grow old? No, they die too.Their yearly trick of looking newIs written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles threshIn fullgrown thickness every May.Last year is dead, they seem to say,Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. "The Trees" "A beautiful animation of Philip Larkin’s The Trees", BBC (2 December 2015), Online Collected Poems (1988) One of the sadder things, I think,Is how our birthdays slowly sink:Presents and parties disappear,The cards grow fewer year by year,Till, when one reaches sixty-five,How many care we're still alive? "Dear Charles, My Muse, asleep or dead" (for Charles Causley) Quotes about Larkin Reprinted reviews are not, as a rule, easily acceptable, but this book of jazz criticism by a distinguished poet is a different case. For a start, the writing is as crisp as you might expect and the pieces, within their small compass, are beautifully shaped. He believes the classic age was the 1920s and 1930s, an unfashionable view although I happen to share it. His great hero is Sidney Bechet, the soprano saxophonist, but his admiration in this area is widespread and he even allows white players other than Bix into his pantheon, another heresy. His general thesis, a return to the human values of early jazz, is acceptable enough, but the waspish relish with which he attacks everything outside his own tastes is hysterical and in the end alienating, even to those of us who more or less agree with him. George Melly "All What Jazz by Philip Larkin - archive, 8 February 1970" The Observer (reprinted 10 February 2019) Larkin was a jazz reviewer for The Daily Telegraph from 1961 to 1971. The poet that I find inexhaustible in my delight of his work is still Philip Larkin. Derek Walcott, 90 interview collected in Conversations with Derek Walcott edited by William Baer (1996) External links "Unknown Philip Larkin poem found in shoebox" by Richard Lea, in The Guardian (6 December 2010) Category:1922 births Category:1985 deaths Category:Academics from England Category:Agnostics Category:Novelists from England Category:Poets from England Category:Librarians from England Category:People from Coventry Category:Philosophical pessimists Category:University of Oxford alumni Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Category:Formalist poets