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
poetry wordsworth deprivation
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
time
What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days?
always-trying people feels
I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
firsts ends bans
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
home winning lasts
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back
earth mess
Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about....
strong feelings vanishing
I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action
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.
echoes woods firsts
This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
pain years house
So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.
book food eye
I like spaghetti because you don't have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it's all the same.
boredom firsts life-is
Life is first boredom, then fear,
enemy dont-like-me like-me
I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
love suits vicious
Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.