Audio from Philip Larkin :The Sunday Sessions. Footage from Down Cemetery Road, a 1964 BBC Documentary, showing Philip Larkin interviewed by John Betjeman.
"A crowd of craps," - I feel I know them all intimately. And then - a little later "air sharpened blade" - again and again I am continually surprised by this body of work, this eloquent and sardonic verse which induces an in-drawn breath when it unexpectedly reveals something unique and dare I say it, beautiful.
Twenty years earlier, Larkin wrote about this subject in his poem "Best Society", where the narrator defiantly choses solitude at the end. He was 29 when he wrote that, and 49 when he wrote "Vers de Societe", where he says "only the young can be alone freely".
In Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner, she mentions this poem by Philip Larkin "about the pain of loneliness vs the discomfort of social interaction" and "This Be The Verse" about how your parents mess you up
"A crowd of craps," - I feel I know them all intimately. And then - a little later "air sharpened blade" - again and again I am continually surprised by this body of work, this eloquent and sardonic verse which induces an in-drawn breath when it unexpectedly reveals something unique and dare I say it, beautiful.
Twenty years earlier, Larkin wrote about this subject in his poem "Best Society", where the narrator defiantly choses solitude at the end. He was 29 when he wrote that, and 49 when he wrote "Vers de Societe", where he says "only the young can be alone freely".
In Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner, she mentions this poem by Philip Larkin "about the pain of loneliness vs the discomfort of social interaction" and "This Be The Verse" about how your parents mess you up