Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin (Continuum Literary Studies)
Books, Inq. (Free subscription) | yesterday
... The Poems of Thomas Hardy . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.) Philip Larkin -- the Eeyore of modern poetry -- would rank Hardy as high as Yeats, whom he occasionally resembles. I wouldn't go that far, if only because few lines of Hardy are outstandingly memorable. One should read poems, not lines.
Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
News Article Tape: ( ragline )___ Telegraph: Philip Larkin's love for mother and father shown in letters ___( ragline )___ The Guardian: Friedrich von Schiller: the Romantic lover ___( ragline )___ Telegraph: T.S. Eliot does not correspond with his letters ___( ragline )___ The Kansas City Star: Kelly Cherry's "Girl in a Library" and "The Retreats of Thought" ___( ragline )___ Electronic...
Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
wrote Philip Larkin. "They may not mean to, but they do." He went on to say that children simply inherited their parents' faults and told his readers that they should actually avoid having children. But unpublished letters from Larkin to his parents Sydney and Eva show that he enjoyed a closer relationship with them than he portrayed in poems such as This Be The Verse. from Telegraph: Philip...
Books, Inq. (Free subscription) | 11/24/2009
... Philip Larkin's love for mother and father shown in letters .
Beattie's Book Blog (Free subscription) | 11/18/2009
Andrew Motion to Chair The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010 Sir Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, (pic left by Johnny Ring), is today (Wednesday 18th November) announced as Chair of the judges for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction – the most significant literary prize in the English language. Andrew Motion comments, ‘ It’s an honour to be asked to chair the Man Booker Prize,...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
This collection of essays by writers on their friends, all of which were first published in the New York Review of Books , throws up a few oddities from the outset. The remit goes beyond the potentially incestuous world of literature to include music, art and science, and so there are reminiscences from Robert Oppenheimer on Einstein and Joseph Brodsky on Isaiah Berlin, in addition to the more predictable...
baithak (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Juba in a jam - Salva Kiir's controversial remark regarding the possibility of secession just shows that the southern Sudanese will not opt for unity at any cost, surmises Gamal Nkrumah Pakistan's terrorist surge - Cutting off the money supply to terrorists and diversifying economic and military aid are key to winning the battle for Pakistan, writes Tariq Osman Hyder . Without adequate multinational...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
A new collection showcases young poets whose work soars above the tired editorial clichés In 1962, Penguin published an anthology edited by Al Alvarez, bombastically entitled The New Poetry . Alvarez introduced his selection with a now-famous essay in which he expressed his belief that the postwar English literary scene had become insular and moribund, its poetry calcifying into the "academic-administrative...
Squandermania and other foibles (Free subscription) | 10/28/2009
1.) Recently discovered letters from Philip Larkin to Monica Jones disclose that the poet became so obsessed with the hit television show Baywatch that he considered writing to the producers and offering his services as their new leading man. 2.) "The fact that poetic and literary cultures in Britain are still resolutely separate from other artforms, unless dealing with theatrical performance,...
Helen Smith (Free subscription) | 10/23/2009
Yes, of course I watched Nick Griffin on Question Time last night. But before that I went to Josephine Hart's Poetry Hour at the Royal Society, as part of the British Academy Literature Week. Kenneth Cranham, Charles Dance and Elizabeth McGovern read poetry by T.S. Eliot, Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Kipling and Robert Frost. It was wonderful. One of my favourite...
The Compass Rose (Free subscription) | 10/16/2009
Philip Larkin, who lived a life of quiet desperation, working as a librarian nearly all his adult life, managed to achieve the status of best-loved poet in England over the last half of the 20th Century. Larkin was not an attractive man. His poems are modest, his assertions cautious, his manner self-effacing (even self-deprecating). Nevertheless, Larkin can be moving. One of my favorites, which I first...
Full Comment (Free subscription) | 10/14/2009
English poet Philip Larkin, informed that heaven would restore him to a state of childish innocence, abjured the supposed gift, preferring "money, keys, wallets, letters, books, long-playing records, dinner, the opposite sex and other solaces of adulthood." I know what he meant. In the Thirties, Larkin's era, as for my generation that followed, life still had a defined beginning, a middle...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 10/08/2009
TS Eliot is given the title of 'nation's favourite poet' by an online poll hosted by the BBC to mark National Poetry Day The rousing strains of Rudyard Kipling's "If" might have catapulted him to a landslide victory in the vote for the nation's favourite poem back in 1995, but the reading tastes of the UK appear to have taken a more modernist turn over the following 14 years with TS Eliot...
ZYZZYVASPEAKS (Free subscription) | 10/01/2009
The most listens for any poetry selection on lala.com, which is mostly about listening to music albums for free, but does have a Spoken Word section and within that a Poetry section, is from the album Persephone by John Most . It had received, when I listened, 31 listens. The top 16 listens were other Mosts. Number 17 was Philip Larkin, followed by 18 William S. Burroughs, 19 Billy Collins, and 20...
You Don't Say (Free subscription) | 09/27/2009
Every few years, it seems, some necessity demands removal of superfluous books from the shelves — or books that can be perceived as superfluous, if there are such things. When I was dealt a hand of aces and eights at The Sun in April, I had two cartons of books to remove from the premises. I can smuggle an occasional volume past Kathleen, but an additional bookcase would not escape her vigilant...
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