Word: larkin
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...Girl in Winter, by Philip Larkin. Layers of loneliness are peeled off lonely people with dexterity in this novel by one of England's finest poets...
When he graduated from Oxford in 1943, Poet Philip Larkin dreamed of becoming a famous novelist and living on the Riviera "like Somerset Maugham." But after two novels flopped in Britain, he decided he was better suited to poetry, confessing later: "It's like moving to a much smaller house after finding you cannot afford to keep up the mansion of your dreams." Larkin has become one of England's finest poets, but he may have deserted his mansion too soon. The second novel, A Girl in Winter, has now been published in the U.S.; and while...
...Larkin has a poet's reverence for the small detail that shapes a scene or character. Thrust into a dentist's chair, a terrified girl imagines that the drill hovering above her has the "shape of a great hooded bird." And his small scope is deceptive. His characters are afraid of life only because they are in need of love. Their peevishness, spitefulness and British reserve all mask an inner anguish, conceal layers of loneliness that Larkin peels off with precision...
These lines were written by the most talented of The Movement's poets, 40-year-old Philip Larkin (The Less Deceived). Larkin has the happy faculty of rescuing the special tenderness or peculiar anguish of small experiences that everyone has had but no one has bothered to examine. At his best, he is a dwindled Wordsworth in whose ear the ghost of Rilke sometimes whispers. In this little poem, one of Larkin's subtlest, it whispers of-death...
Poetry & Life. Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Larkin, Kinsella-they are all good poets, but to say that they are the best of the postwar period is not to say much for a period characterized by a ferment without much effect, a prodigy promised but not performed. Among the couths, even the inconsequent are competent. "The level of technique in verse," says Poet Auden, "is probably higher today than ever before." But with all their skill, most contemporary poets seem to have little to say. To paraphrase Poet Jarrell: They are professional magicians who have nothing up their sleeves-not even their...