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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.

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
Bounds
Decide
Poetry
Instead
Intellectually
Write
Fatal
Poems
Writing
Honour
Trying
Bound
Good

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I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.
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As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
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I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.
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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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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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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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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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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.
Philip Larkin
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Philip Larkin
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Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
Philip Larkin
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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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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
Philip Larkin