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Philip Larkin: Selected Letters
Philip Larkin: Selected Letters presents a selection of Larkin’s astonishingly frank and entertaining correspondence, whether with literary figures like Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman, or with his more intimate personal friends.
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The enormous popular appeal of Philip Larkin’s poetry has long been established; but oddly little is known to his admiring public about the personality behind the work.
The Selected Letters will change this, throwing light on a more complex, and in many ways more remarkable, figure than most readers will be expecting. Whether addressing his literary friends – who included Barbara Pym, Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman – or those less prominently placed, Larkin shows himself to have been one of the frankest and most generously entertaining letter-writers of the century.
Confessions, jokes, advice, scurrilities, pronouncements on literature and jazz, impromptu verses published here for the first time, gossip and wisdom abound in these pages. They give an astonishing view of a great poet’s progress from brash youth to rueful age, and, in complementing the poems, provide a biographical document that no serious reader can afford to ignore.
Philip Larkin, poet, novelist and librarian, was born in Coventry in 1922. He published four volumes of poetry – The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) – for which he received innumerable honours including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the WH Smith Award. He also wrote two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and his journalism is collected in two volumes, All…
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