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“... become publicly notorious.’ There is a fine, cautious, detailed review of volumes of verse by Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill; there are notes on Ford Madox Ford, Saint-John Perse and many others. And above all there is a beautiful, puzzled essay on Cavafy in which Auden, who firmly believes you need to know his or her language, and perhaps even be a ...”

“... In 1974, with High Windows about to appear, Larkin lamented in a letter that critics would have passed the word around – Donnez la côtelette à Larquin – give Larkin the chop. Of course he was wrong. The chorus of praise swelled higher than ever: with each slim volume the certainty and authority of the poems and their unique feel of personality left readers dazzled ...”

“... who sees an opportunity to reclaim her ex-lover John Pomfret when their children (her son Philip, his daughter Mary) fall in love. Realising that only one of the two possible Weatherby-Pomfret marriages can take place, with one killing off the other, she sets out to sabotage the young couple. Her devious manipulations are horribly plain to the reader ...”

“... outcry of a soul in pain’. He was taking ‘imaginative revenge’ on his father, Philip Gray, a violent man who seems regularly to have beaten Gray’s beloved mother, Dorothy. Ugolino is found in hell gnawing on the skull of his enemy Ruggieri, so Mack wonders whether ‘Gray was inflicting within his mind a suitable vengeance on the ...”

“... confronts ‘a stricken, blotchy, corpse-pallid, double-chinned, river-veined wreck’. As Philip Larkin pointed out, Connolly’s lavish self-deprecation was something of a con job. ‘He spent most of his life doing what he wanted. He liked travelling, and did a lot of it. He liked women, and had a lot of them. He liked celebrated and ...”

“... This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition with that of Kingsley Amis, close friend of the poet’s for over forty years; and to begin with Amis’s recent Booker Prize-winning ...”

“... middle to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall. Trads ...”

“... Philip Larkin​ claimed that sexual intercourse began in 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. A better (if rhyme-busting) bet might have been 1965, when BBC One broadcast Up the Junction, a riotous group portrait of women at work in a Battersea chocolate factory and on the pull in Clapham, in its Wednesday Play slot ...”

“... according to Martin Amis the poet is defined as a person who is incapable of driving a car. Philip Larkin, the great Eeyore of English verse, pushing his bike through a Hull graveyard, white raincoat and clips, misted spectacles, for a John Betjeman documentary. David Gascoyne, after years of silence, came to Cambridge for a poetry festival in ...”

“... have been.) He went on to do a degree course at Hull, in the process making the mistake of asking Philip Larkin: ‘Do you do seminars?’ (‘He looked down his nose at me – and walked on.’) Prescott was keeping up his interest in politics all the while. He fought a losing campaign in Southport in 1966 while still a student at Hull; that might sound ...”

“... to attain. Its only near rival in the ratio of text to editorial matter is The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin edited by Archie Burnett, a director, like Ricks, of Boston University’s Editorial Institute (currently, alas, under threat of closure), which bulked out Larkin’s four slim volumes to a staggering 729 ...”

“... all means, but one must observe the rules where they are laid down by custom of centuries.’ As Philip Larkin noted in a mildly feline review of Steps (1958), Graves sought poems which are ‘moon magical enough to walk off the page’ but was unable to ‘leave a poem alone when he had finished it’. Many poets combine the ululating shaman with the ...”

“... odds with all these changes in his world. Some of the changes are more significant than others. In Philip Roth’s novel Sabbath’s Theatre, the ageing, suicidal Mickey Sabbath is saved by the mechanical marvels of another generation. He finds a box marked ‘Morty’s Things’ in an unopened drawer – the box holds his brother’s possessions, returned to ...”

“... Wife’ – but the most singular and most effective poem in the whole collection is a parody of Philip Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ called ‘The Larkin Automatic Car Wash’. Like all good parodies, it is not only an act of homage but a precision instrument revealing the full capabilities and depth of its ...”

“... mattered to him, including early Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Rilke, some Forrest Reid, Patrick Kavanagh, Philip Larkin (‘His work will outwear his own time and all its fashionable gases,’ he wrote to Monteith after Larkin’s death), and, later, Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy, the stories of Alistair MacLeod and John ...”