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
reading giving thrill
Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick; I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.
earth mess
Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about....
unique needs done
I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.
death fear-of-death walks
Walk with the dead For fear of death.
couple reading thinking
I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.
weed beach distance
Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
grief years tree
The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
depression wordsworth daffodil
Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.
poetry emotion ends
Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance
summer butterfly looks
And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
reading book crap
Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
majority ends rejects
Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.'' Philip Larkin
attitude age stones
Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
being-different different originality
Originality is being different from oneself, not others.