Philip Larkin

From Philosopedia

Larkin, Philip (1922–1985)

Larkin, a librarian at the University of Hull in England, and a poet and novelist, was a non-believer whose Selected Letters reveal that he lamented his inability to complete more than two poems a year.

In his work, he chronicled England’s post-1945 problems, and he was highly opinionated. Being a librarian, for example, involved handing out “tripey novels to morons.” Literature needs no definition, for it is simply “what one thrills to.” As for England, “God, what a hole [with its] witless crapulous people, delivered over gagged and bound to TV, motoring, and Mackeson’s Stout!” As for parents: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with faults they had, then add some new ones, just for you.”

A mordant humorist, he wrote shortly before his death, “How good the 1950s seem as far as rhyming and making sense and being clever go.”

Larkin has the distinction, according to Martin Seymour-Smith, “of being the last Englishman to write a viable non-expressionist body of poetry. We should be grateful to and for him.”

A 1993 biography by Andrew Motion, however, points out that recently located Larkin’s letters show him to have been an anti-Semite, a racist, and a misogynist. Anthony Thwaite, one of Larkin’s literary executors, found the following ditty entitled “How To Win the Next Election”:

• Prison for the strikers / Bring back the cat / Kick out the niggers / How about that?

In a 1985 letter written two months before he died, Larkin wrote to a childhood friend, Colin Gunner, “I find the ‘state of the nation’ quite terrifying. In 10 years’ time we shall all be cowering under our beds as hordes of blacks steal anything they can lay their hands on.”

Larkin’s father, Sydney, was known to have been openly sympathetic to Adolf Hitler, and Larkin is widely said to have “adopted and adapted” some of his father’s views.