Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin CH CBE FRSLwas an English poet, novelist and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jilland A Girl in Winter, and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddingsand High Windows. He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered in All What Jazz: A...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 August 1922
tree said leafs
The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said;
looks headings train
You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
unique sanity affair
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familar,eternalizing the poet's own poerception in unique and original verbal form.
knives mind drawers
All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives,
What are days for? Days are where we live.
majority ends rejects
Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.'' Philip Larkin
summer mother hate
My mother, who hates thunderstorms, Holds up each summer day and shakes It out suspiciously, lest swarms Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there....
air blue glasses
And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
kind difficult stills
It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
strange grew constant
In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange, there was one constant good: she did not change.
art lying thinking
I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
novelists poet ifs
If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'
freedom ties self
No one can tear your thread out of himself. No one can tie you down or set you free.
freedom long slides
... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.