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“... School, The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto keep wicket at Lord’s.Like Station ...”

“... William Carlos Williams had his medical practice; Wallace Stevens had his insurance office; Philip Larkin had his obligations as a university librarian. Auden had prose. Lots of it: several of his New Yorker reviews weigh in at well over eight thousand words, though he economised on effort, and maximised his income, by quoting copiously: in a piece ...”

“... one of those, like Spark, for whom the fact of death gives life its shape and meaning or, as for Philip Larkin, its appalling pointlessness. Although she suggests that there is something in the parallel between literary and religious narrative she is not much interested in the idea of ritual as a way of externalising emotional and psychological ...”

“... with Keith doing his best, as he confesses, to ‘ponce off the spirit of the times’. Philip Larkin – the usual – is quoted on the matter; there’s a bouncy riff about ‘girls acting like boys’ being ‘in the air’, and another about all the ‘cool pants’ a chick has to buy if she hopes to carry things off. Keith and his friends ...”

“... on Dante, Aquinas and Parisian neo-Thomism, rather than the parochial pseudo-religiosity of a Philip Larkin. In the epoch of High Modernism, it was for the most part the radical Right, rather than the liberal or social democratic centre ground, that opened up cosmopolitan perspectives in a stiflingly claustrophobic England, as exiles and émigrés ...”

“... and feel what they say, while never running out of rhythm and never speaking in tongues. It likes Philip Larkin, the unlikely patron saint of self-help, though it’s amusing to consider how untouched he would be to find his effusions on hopeless love, coming death and boredom deployed in a continuing effort to floss the minds of the readers of the Mail ...”

“... he appeals. Surely the only thing in common between Samuel Beckett, Miles Davis, Martin Scorsese, Philip Larkin, Frank O’Hara, Bob Marley, would be their shared interest in his music. His songs have been more widely covered by other musicians, ranging from Frank Sinatra to Jimi Hendrix, from Olivia Newton-John to the Waterboys, than those of any other ...”

“... Kings. C.H. Sisson finds himself in the same company in the bracing reign of Henry VIII. Philip Larkin joins Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen for the final flowering of the Great War. Tom Paulin has denounced Mr Baker’s attempt to establish a single English tradition as the work of a ‘blood and soil’ nationalist. Jonathan Clark has likened ...”

“... thought: ‘I was sick and tired of everything/When I called you last night.’ And I was reading Philip Larkin, where he says about nothing like something happening anywhere. The next Saturday it was West Brom at home. Puppy love, pop tunes, A-level poetry, crap soccer. This seems to be the recipe. Old soccer bores don’t really stand a chance. Even ...”

“... conflicted and calculating man. The shock produced is akin to the revelations about Paul de Man or Philip Larkin. Lee Siegel is horrified by the racism in Shadows, by the ‘crude, alienated caricatures’ of blacks, gentiles and vulgar Miami Jews who ‘make Goodbye, Columbus look like “World of Our Fathers” ’. According to Hadda, the people who ...”

“... OWN TISSUES’, as if the body’s every activity could be charted by a sort of somatic poetry. Philip Larkin dryly observed that ‘our flesh / Surrounds us with its own decisions’; Olson felt these decisions might be somehow voiced. He planned a book that was to be ‘a record in the perfectest language I can manage of the ...”

“... on Sidney Keyes, Vernon Watkins, Anne Ridler and Norman Nicholson, and on the undergraduate Philip Larkin, who admired his lecturer’s novels. Victor Gollancz and L.H. Myers, both given to occult speculations, were fans of the thrillers; Dylan Thomas attended his lectures. There was a harried quality about his later years. Between 1936 and his ...”

“... compounds irony with pathos. At times, to an English reader, he seems not light-years away from Philip Larkin: but this is probably only a trick of the light and of the angle from which we come at him. For we are told, and in places can see for ourselves, that both his melancholy and his irony can be called ‘savage’ and ‘corrosive’ – epithets ...”

“... prone to congratulate themselves on being out of step with their times), or perhaps, to take up Larkin’s more familiar idiom, one of ‘the less deceived’. Even though we haven’t even got to the contents page, we’re starting to catch a whiff of the ‘no bullshit’ bullshit that is one of Hitchens’s trademarks. The epigraph is from Proust ...”

“... was ‘a Cambridge passion for Eng. Lit… . combined with a rather taking bully-boy strut’. Philip Hobsbaum, also alert to Gunn, took the view that the poem ‘Carnal Knowledge’ was ‘slick’ and ‘execrable’. Alvarez, as Wootten notes, reviewed Gunn’s first book twice. In one review, he called the collection ‘for my money, the most ...”