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
thinking people pubs
I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems
love dream hands
I wonder love can have already set In dreams, when we've not met More times than I can number on one hand.
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
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.
lying careers littles
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
writing self two
When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
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.
according across difference life lived loving means might sleeps
In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love. / To some it means the difference they could make / By loving others, but across most it sweeps / As all they might have done had they been loved. / That nothing cures.
I have wished you something None of the others would....
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.