Philip Larkin (Writers & Their Work S.) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

With the publication of Philip Larkin's The Less Deceived in 1955, one of the most retiring of British poets became one of the most widely acclaimed, and the growing esteem of the critics was followed in 1965 by the award of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Although his earlier verse in The North Ship and XX Poems attracted little attention, the reputation which he established with The Less Deceived was still further enhanced by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and by High Windows (1974). His poetry is essentially that of a private, solitary individual: it dwells, always with precise social observation and sometimes with humour, on such themes as loneliness, age and death, the desolate distance between human hope and mundane reality, and the illusionary nature of choice.

Alan Brownjohn considers that Larkin 'has produced the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any English poet in the last twenty-five years.' He deals with the influence on Larkin's poetry of 'modernism', assesses his verse as indisputably modern in its content and its cadences. He also discusses Larkin's two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947) as well as his jazz reviews for the Daily Telegraph, collected in All What Jazz (1970).

Brownjohn, himself a poet, is Senior Lecturer in English at the Polytechnic of the South Bank, Roehampton. His books of poems included The Railing (1961), The Lions' Mouth (1967), Sandgrains on a Tray (1969), Brownjohn's Beast (1970), Warrior's Career (1972) and A Song of Good Life (1975).

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