Word: larkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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COLLECTED POEMS by Philip Larkin; edited by Anthony Thwaite...
...Philip Larkin, the pre-eminent poet in English of his time, died, after a brief struggle with cancer, in 1985, at age 63. Soon afterward his diaries were shredded, as he had instructed, at the library of England's Hull University, where he had worked for 30 years in self-elected obscurity. His manuscripts and unpublished poems escaped a similar fate thanks to a contradiction in his will: one clause called for the destruction of these papers, while another allowed trustees of the estate the right to decide which ones merited publication. Given the choice between guillotine and press...
...nature of his triumph, though, is elusive and peculiar. Larkin and his contemporaries inherited the scorched earth of modernism -- the towering shadow cast by Yeats, the multilingual complexities introduced by Eliot and Pound, the daunting technical virtuosity of Auden. Starting out, Larkin had the good taste to imitate all these (except Pound), with some Dylan Thomas thrown in for good measure. He got out from under his predecessors only when he learned to lower his voice, to submerge complexities of thought and feeling beneath a serene, limpid surface...
...turning point seems to have been reached in 1948, in the never-before- publi shed "An April Sunday brings the snow." Larkin remembers his father, recently dead, and the plum jam preserves he had put up: "Which now you will not sit and eat./ Behind the glass, under the cellophane,/ Remains your final summer -- sweet/ And meaningless, and not to come again...
Rookie of the Year Andre Faust Princeton (17) Jim Larkin Vermont (15) Shawn Rivers St. Lawrence...