This week’s Sunday read is Michael Dirda’s review of Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth for The Washington Post, as well as an excerpt from the book.
Larkin has been called the best-loved English poet of the 20th century. His poems are approachable and profound, and seem to acquire more meaning and more truth every time they are reread. His work remains relevant and fresh even three decades after his death.
Booth, a scholar who was also Larkin’s colleague, has written a biography that traces both the events of Larkin’s life and his development as a poet. According to Dirda, Booth paints a portrait of Larkin “as refracted in his writing”.
Read the review:
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is as famous a poet as any in the second half of the 20th century. In England he holds a roughly comparable position to Robert Frost in the United States — a beloved, curmudgeonly figure, with dark corners in his private life, who produced clear, accessible poetry that, once read, could never be forgotten. “Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me). . . . What will survive of us is love. . . . Age, and then the only end of age. . . . Never such innocence again.” Unlike Frost, with his shock of windblown hair and openly bardic manner, Larkin — balding, heavily bespectacled, nattily dressed in checked sport coats and bow ties — looked precisely like a bachelor-librarian at a provincial university. That is, of course, just what he was. Nowadays, he seems an early icon of geek-chic.
But appearances tell only half the story, which is what one might say about James Booth’s “Philip Larkin: Life, Love and Art.” Given its overall heft, this book looks like a new biography — following the pioneering work of Richard Bradford and Andrew Motion — and, indeed, does track the major events of Larkin’s 63 years. Booth’s real concern, however, is — to borrow a Wordsworthian phrase — “the growth of a poet’s mind.”
In his biography, Booth suggests that the poetry and personality of Larkin have been misinterpreted by decades of academics. He attempts to put forward a faithful portrait of the man and the poet using information gleaned from years of research and from Larkin’s friends and acquaintances.
In the introduction to Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love, Booth sets out the facts and controversies of Larkin’s life, and explains his massive impact as a poet.
Read the excerpt:
Larkin is, by common consent, the best-loved British poet of the last century. Phrases and lines from his poems are more frequently quoted than those of any other poet of his time: ‘What are days for?’; ‘Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three’; ‘What will survive of us is love’; ‘Never such innocence again’. Already during his lifetime the publication of a Larkin work was a n event. Within days of the appearance of a new poem in the New Statesman, the Listener or the Times Literary Supplement, ‘people would have it by heart and be quoting it over the dinner table’. A recent blogger speaks for many when he recalls reading his slim volume ‘to tatters’. Since his death Larkin’s poetic reputation has become even more secure.
Book details
- Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love by James Booth
EAN: 9781620407813
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