Download or read book Philip Larkin written by James Booth and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 815 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: _______________ 'Superb ... Booth's psychology is subtler than Motion's and more convincing' - Peter J. Conradi, Spectator 'Booth's diligence is unquestionable and even readers who think they know the poems will see nuances they had previously missed ... should render further attention by biographers superfluous for several years' - Guardian 'Those of us who never warmed to Larkin the man or poet, will have our aversions challenged by this sympathetic but different account of his life and work' - Independent _______________ A fascinating and controversial study of Philip Larkin's world and how it bled into his work, James Booth's biography is a unique insight into the man whose life and art have been misunderstood for too long Philip Larkin was that rare thing among poets: a household name in his own lifetime. Lines such as 'Never such innocence again' and 'Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three' made him one of the most popular poets of the last century. Larkin's reputation as a man, however, has been more controversial. A solitary librarian known for his pessimism, he disliked exposure and had no patience with the literary circus. And when, in 1992, the publication of his Selected Letters laid bare his compartmentalised personal life, accusations of duplicity, faithlessness, racism and misogyny were levelled against him. There is, of course, no requirement that poets should be likeable or virtuous, but James Booth asks whether art and life were really so deeply at odds with each other. Can the poet who composed the moving 'Love Songs in Age' have been such a cold-hearted man? Can he who uttered the playful, self-deprecating words 'Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth' really have been so boorish? A very different public image is offered by those who shared the poet's life: the women with whom he was romantically involved, his friends and his university colleagues. It is with their personal testimony, including access to previously unseen letters, that Booth reinstates a man misunderstood: not a gaunt, emotional failure, but a witty, provocative and entertaining presence, delightful company; an attentive son and a man devoted to the women he loved. Meticulously researched, unwaveringly frank and full of fresh material, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love definitively reinterprets one of our greatest poets.
Download or read book Somewhere Becoming Rain written by CLIVE. JAMES and published by Picador. This book was released on 2021-09-02 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned critic, bestselling author and award-winning poet Clive James offers an exploration and celebration of one of his favourite writers, Philip Larkin.
Download or read book James Larkin Pearson written by Gregory S. Taylor and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This biography of James Larkin Pearson employs the poet laureate's words, poems, and prose to tell his life story and to examine modern poetry, amateur journalism, and North Carolina history. The work also examines the Tar Heel spirit and studies the benefits and pitfalls that...
Download or read book Philip Larkin written by Stephen Cooper and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overturning many of the established perspectives on Larkin's poetry and prose, Cooper's book presents new evidence from a range of previously unpublished sources, and is the first full-length critical work to analyse Larkin's early fiction, as well as advancing new readings of The Less Deceived', The Whitsun Weddings' and High Windows'. Critics have tended to label Larkin's poetry as sexist, racist and reactionary. However, this volume demonstrates that Larkin's artistic impulse throughout his career was to challenge orthodox models of social and sexual politics. Focusing on the Brunette Coleman novellas and the unfinished novels, a structural blueprint is identified as prefiguring the later poems' commentary on sexual and social conduct. Further unpublished material includes correspondence, workbook drafts, dream records, and a playscript, depicting, alternately, hostility to wartime heroics, revulsion from capitalism, unease with traditional gender roles and an interest in psychoanalysis. This study makes available to scholars paintings by Larkin's friend, James Sutton, which illuminate the writer's concern with social oppression, especially the predicament of women in the 1940s. This is a fresh and revealing study on Larkin's artistic subversion; stylistic and thematic, it reveals the underlying themes of Larkin's entire oeuvre.
Download or read book Early Larkin written by James Underwood and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Astute." Times Literary Supplement Beginning in the late 1930s, this is the first book-length critical study of Larkin's early work: his poetry, novels, short fictions, essays, and letters. The book tells the story of Philip Larkin's early literary development, starting with Larkin's earliest literary efforts and his remarkable correspondence with Jim Sutton, and ending at the point Larkin's maturity begins, with the writing of his first great poems. In providing a comprehensive and systematic study of this part of Larkin's life, this book also presents a new and surprising narrative of Larkin's development. Critics have presented Larkin's early career as a false start which he overcame by swapping Yeats's influence for Hardy's. Having re-discovered Hardy's poetry in 1946, the story goes, Larkin realised the potential of writing about his own life, and disavowed Yeats. Central to this book's controversial counter-narrative is an insistence on the significance of Brunette Coleman, the female heteronym Larkin invented in 1943. Three years before his re-discovery of Hardy, Larkin wrote a strange and unique series of works for schoolgirls under Coleman's name. These writings not only led him away from Yeats and other hindering influences, but also away from himself. Whereas the Yeats-to-Hardy narrative emphasises the autobiographical qualities of Larkin's mature verse, Early Larkin proposes that the writer's breakthrough was a result of his burgeoning 'interest in everything outside himself' – itself the consequence of his curious experiment with Brunette Coleman.
Download or read book James Larkin Pearson written by Gregory S. Taylor and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-05-20 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is the first academic biography of North Carolina poet laureate James Larkin Pearson (1879-1981). Using material from Pearson’s personal archive in Wilkes County, from the North Carolina Collection and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from contemporary examinations of his life and work, this study offers deeply personal insights into his life and provides extensive examinations of his hopes, joys, fears, pains, and sorrows. The work also includes lengthy studies of his poetry and his journalistic efforts and examines their place within the larger cultural milieu. In the process, the book addresses two themes that become apparent in Pearson’s life and work: his Tar Heel spirit and his individualism. He was a fighter who overcame poverty, a poor education, personal tragedies, and professional neglect to achieve great success. He also abided by his own set of religious, artistic, and political values regardless of the consequences. This work thus offers the first personal and professional examination of James Larkin Pearson, provides insights on North Carolina and its people, and examines the benefits and drawbacks of following one’s own path.
Download or read book Philip Larkin Poems written by Philip Larkin and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time, Faber publish a selection from the poetry of Philip Larkin. Drawing on Larkin's four collections and on his uncollected poems. Chosen by Martin Amis. 'Many poets make us smile; how many poets make us laugh - or, in that curious phrase, "laugh out loud" (as if there's another way of doing it)? Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom?... Larkin, often, is more than memorable: he is instantly unforgettable.' - Martin Amis
Download or read book Philip Larkin Letters Home written by Philip Larkin and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2018-10-30 with total page 671 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Letters Home gives access to the last major archive of Larkin's writing to remain unpublished: the letters to members of his family. These correspondences help tell the story of how Larkin came to be the writer and the man he was: to his father Sydney, a 'conservative anarchist' and admirer of Hitler, who died relatively early in Larkin's life; to his timid depressive mother Eva, who by contrast, lived long, and whose final years were shadowed by dementia; and to his sister Kitty, the sparse surviving fragment of whose correspondence with her brother gives an enigmatic glimpse of a complex and intimate relationship- But it was the years during which he and his sister looked after their mother in particular that shaped the writer we know so well: a number of poems written over this time are for her, and the mood of pain, shadow and despondency that characterises his later verse draws its strength from his experience of the long, lonely years of her senility. One surprising element in the volume, however, is the joie de vivre shown in the large number of witty and engaging drawings of himself and Eva, as 'Young Creature' and 'Old Creature', with which he enlivens his letters throughout the three decades of her widowhood.This important edition, meticulously edited by Larkin's biographer, James Booth, is a key piece of scholarship that completes the portrait of this most cherished of English poets.
Download or read book James Larkin written by Emmet O'Connor and published by Stylus Publishing, LLC.. This book was released on 2002 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Larkin (1876-1947) retains a central position in the pantheon of the Irish labour movement. In the popular consciousness he is most commonly linked to his role in the epic 1913 Dublin Lockout and to his turbulent leadership of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union. Less well known is his role within international communism and his attempts to establish a significant socialist presence in southern Ireland during the 1920s. In general, labour historians have been kind to Larkin and his style of leadership, which was often abrasive and dictatorial, has often been portrayed as a form of improvisation engendered by contemporary exigencies. In this important new biography of Larkin leading labour historian Emmet O'Connor radically reassesses the man and asks whether he should be viewed as a "hero" of the working class, or as a "wrecker" whose difficult personality was detrimental to both trade unionism and an emerging Irish communist movement. O'Connor uses new archival sources, including declassified Soviet Union and FBI files, to cast new light on Larkin and on his relations with international communism. He aims to uncover the motivation behind Larkin's public persona, and to assess the reality obscured by the myth.
Download or read book Six Poets written by Alan Bennett and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inimitable Alan Bennett selects and comments upon six favorite poets and the pleasures of their works In this candid, thoroughly engaging book, Alan Bennett creates a unique anthology of works by six well-loved poets. Freely admitting his own youthful bafflement with poetry, Bennett reassures us that the poets and poems in this volume are not only accessible but also highly enjoyable. He then proceeds to prove irresistibly that this is so. Bennett selects more than seventy poems by Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Philip Larkin. He peppers his discussion of these writers and their verse with anecdotes, shrewd appraisal, and telling biographical detail: Hardy lyrically recalls his first wife, Emma, in his poetry, although he treated her shabbily in real life. The fabled Auden was a formidable and off-putting figure at the lectern. Larkin, hoping to subvert snooping biographers, ordered personal papers shredded upon his death. Simultaneously profound and entertaining, Bennett's book is a paean to poetry and its creators, made all the more enjoyable for being told in his own particular voice. its creators, made all the more enjoyable for being told in his own particular voice.
Download or read book Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time written by Carl Morse and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 1989-11-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best lesbian and gay poetry written from 1950 to the present. Contributors include, W H Auden, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Grahn, Langston Hughes, Audre Lourde and many others.
Download or read book Beautiful Pointless written by David Orr and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-04-12 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "David Orr is no starry-eyed cheerleader for contemporary poetry; Orr’s a critic, and a good one. . . . Beautiful & Pointless is a clear-eyed, opinionated, and idiosyncratic guide to a vibrant but endangered art form, essential reading for anyone who loves poetry, and also for those of us who mostly just admire it from afar." —Tom Perrotta Award-winning New York Times Book Review poetry columnist David Orr delivers an engaging, amusing, and stimulating tour through the world of poetry. With echoes of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless offers a smart and funny approach to appreciating an art form that many find difficult to embrace.
Download or read book Blue Hanuman written by Joan Larkin and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. "There are few poets in America who can combine Joan Larkin's formal mastery with her emotional intensity." David Bergman Joan Larkin's are poems of "relentless self-examination, taking on love and death, family and sexuality in a voice that is unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed." David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times"
Download or read book The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry written by Blake Morrison and published by Penguin Uk. This book was released on 1982 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin written by Philip Larkin and published by Faber & Faber Poetry. This book was released on 2014-09-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning new edition that brings together all of Larkin's poems in addition to some unpublished pieces.
Download or read book Sentenced to Life written by Clive James and published by Picador. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his new collection of poems - several of which have already become famous before their book publication - Clive James looks back over an extraordinarily rich life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty. There are regrets, but no trace of self-pity in these verses, which - for all their open dealings with death and illness - are primarily a celebration of what is treasurable and memorable in our time here. Again and again, James reminds us that he is not only a poet of effortless wit and lyric accomplishment: he is also an immensely wise one, who delights in using poetic form to bring a razor-sharp focus to his thought. Miraculously, these poems see James writing with his insight and energy not only undiminished but positively charged by his situation: Sentenced to Life represents a career high point from one of the greatest literary intelligences of the age.
Download or read book Poetry Notebook written by Clive James and published by Picador. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clive James is one of our finest critics and best-loved cultural voices. He is also a prize-winning poet. Since he was first enthralled by the mysterious power of poetry, he has been a dedicated student. In fact, for Clive, poetry has been nothing less than the occupation of a lifetime, and in this book he presents a distillation of all he's learned about the art form that matters to him most. With his customary wit, delightfully lucid prose style and wide-ranging knowledge, Clive explains the difference between the innocuous stuff that often passes for poetry today and a real poem: the latter being a work of unity that insists on being heard entire and threatens never to leave the memory. A committed formalist and an astute commentator, Clive offers close and careful readings of individual poems and poets (from Shakespeare to Larkin, Keats to Pound), and in some case second readings or re-readings late in life - just to be sure he wasn't wrong the first time! Whether discussing technical details of metaphorical creativity or simply praising his five favourite collections of all time, he is never less than captivating. Filled with insight and written with an honest, infectious enthusiasm, Poetry Notebook is the product of over fifty years of writing, reading, translating and thinking about poetry.
