Philip Larkin - A Voice of Pain for This Century Essay -- Biography Bi

Philip Larkin - A Voice of Pain for This CenturyOn August 9, 1922, the poet Philip Larkin was born in the town of Coventry in England (Thwaite, earn xvii). After graduating St. Johns College in Oxford in 1943 with a First Class degree, he worked at both the University College of Leicester and Queens College at capital of Northern Ireland before finally settling down at the University of Hull as Librarian in 1955 (Thwaite, Letters xviii). That same year, with the publication of his collection The Less Decieved, he began to be recognized (Thwaite, Introduction xv). His popularity continued to grow thereafter, and over the next twenty years amongst many awards and honorary doctorates he published two more than highly acclaimed books of poetry, The Whitsun Weddings in 1964 and High Windows in 1974 (Thwaite, Introduction xvi). In 1984 he was offered the ultimate title of Poet Laureate, which he declined in component because of shyness and in part because of the conviction that his poet ry had deserted him (Motion 510). With the words I am going to the inevitable, he died a year later on Monday, December 2, 1985 (Motion 521). During his stay at Oxford, Larkin was a member of a group called the Movement, its revolt being against rhetorical excess or cosmic portentousness (Ellmann and OClair 579). He held disdain for the intricate poetical approach of Eliot and Pound in which first of all you have to be terribly educated, you have to read everything to know these things, and secondly youve got somehow to work them in to show that you are working them in (Ellmann and OClair 579). Larkin instead pursued a more even-tempered, conversational idiom, more accurate than magniloquent (Ellmann and OClair 579). barely this even-temperament did n... ... who reside in the twentieth-century and stand as perennial expressions of not only his but of any individuals mind. While the people of the world stabilise anxiously on the verge of a new millenium, only poets of his caliber will be remembered as having the sensitivity to capture the emotional need of this generation that will surely pass on to the next. Works CitedEllmann, Richard, and Robert OClair, eds. Modern Poems A Norton Introduction. New York W.W. Norton and Co., 1989.Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London Marvell Press and Faber and Faber Ltd., 1989. Motion, Andrew. A Writers Life. London Faber and Faber Ltd., 1993.Thwaite, Anthony, ed. Introduction. Collected Poems. By Philip Larkin. London Marvell Press and Faber and Faber Ltd., 1989. Thwaite, Anthony, ed. Selected Letters of Philip Larkin. London Faber and Faber Ltd., 1992.