Philip Larkin | Modernist, Post-WWII, English (2024)

Philip Larkin (born August 9, 1922, Coventry, Warwickshire, England—died December 2, 1985, Kingston upon Hull) was the most representative and highly regarded of the poets who gave expression to a clipped, antiromantic sensibility prevalent in English verse in the 1950s.

Larkin was educated at the University of Oxford on a scholarship, an experience that provided material for his first novel, Jill (1946; rev. ed. 1964). (His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published at his own expense in 1945.) Another novel, A Girl in Winter, followed in 1947. He became well known with The Less Deceived (1955), a volume of verse the title of which suggests Larkin’s reaction and that of other British writers who then came into notice (e.g., Kingsley Amis and John Wain) against the political enthusiasms of the 1930s and what they saw as the emotional excesses of the poetry of the ’40s. His own verse is not without emotion, but it tends to be understated.

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Larkin became librarian at the University of Hull in Yorkshire in 1955 and was jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph (1961–71), from which occupation were gleaned the essays in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–68 (1970). The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) are his later volumes of poetry. He edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973). Required Writing (1982) is a collection of miscellaneous essays.