Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin (August 9, 1922 – December 2, 1985) was an English poet, novelist and jazz critic. One of the most prominent British poets of the second half of the 20th century – he was offered, but declined, the Poet Laureateship following the death of John Betjeman – he spent his working life as a university librarian.

Larkin as critic

Larkin was an major contributor to the re-evaluation of the poetry of Thomas Hardy, which had been ignored in comparison to his work as a novelist. Hardy received the longest selection in Larkin's idiosyncratic and controversial anthology, The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973). Larkin was by contrast a notable critic of modernism in contemporary art and literature; his skepticism is at its most nuanced and illuminating in Required Writing, a collection of his book-reviews and essays; it is at its most enflamed and polemical in his introduction to his collected jazz reviews, All What Jazz.

Related Topics:
Thomas Hardy - 1973 - Modernism

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