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Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison-- Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion.

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
Days
Paying
Soils
Use
Poison
Sickening
Work
Proportion
Toad
Life
Soil
Toads
Bills
Squat
Drive
Brute
Six
Brutes
Pitchfork
Week
Wit
Pitchforks

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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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In everyone there sleeps. A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make. By loving others, but across most it sweeps. As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.
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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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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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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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Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.
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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
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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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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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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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Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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