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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

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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
Poet
Poetry
Literature
Another
Past
Great
Criticisms
Thing
Poets
Criticism

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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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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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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
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Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.
Philip Larkin
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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.
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Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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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.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
Philip Larkin