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
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.
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.
writing trying poetry-is
It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
thinking wish next
Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
past poetry criticism
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
What are days for? Days are where we live.
art children life-is
I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.
men feet literature
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.
past men garden
Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.