Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill and 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 Weddings and High Windows. He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary, and he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. His many honours include the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.
Larkin’s poetry has been characterized as combining “an ordinary, colloquial style“, “clarity“, a “quiet, reflective tone“, “ironic understatement” and a “direct” engagement with “commonplace experiences“,while Jean Hartley summed his style up as a “piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent“. (via Wikipedia)
A few of his great quotes are following:
On Love:
On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.
(From: For Sidney Bechet)
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.
On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.
On Life:
Life has a practice of living you, if you don’t live it.
Half life is over now,
And I meet full face on dark mornings
The bestial visor, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen.
(From: Send No Money)
Life is first boredom, then fear.
(From: Dockery And Son)
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
Parents may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT
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.
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.
On Death:
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
On Happiness:
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don’t you think?
Other Quotes:
Only in books the flat and final happens,
Only in dreams we meet and interlock.
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Picasso.
I am always trying to ‘preserve’ things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide.
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.
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.
I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.