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Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

Philip Larkin

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Philip Larkin
Age: 63 †
Born: 1922
Born: August 9
Died: 1985
Died: December 2
Critic
Journalist
Librarian
Music Critic
Music Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Philip Arthur Larkin
Giant
Giants
Cautiously
Solitude
Unfolds
Sea
Snail
Support
Emerges
Simple
Palm
Like
Supports
Palms

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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.
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You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards
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One of the sadder things, I think, Is how our birthdays slowly sink: Presents and parties disappear, The cards grow fewer year by year, Till, when one reaches sixty-five, How many care we're still alive?
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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
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Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous, Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water, Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter And those she has least use for see her best, Their paths grown craven and circuitous, Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.
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Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: Despite the artful tensions of the calendar, The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, The costly aversion of the eyes from death- Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
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It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin