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Summary
The essential pocket edition of this most beloved and quoted of poets.
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
In lines perfectly constructed and as beautiful as they are plain-spoken, Philip Larkin found a way of delineating our most difficult emotions – giving them back to us in images and formulations that help us both comprehend and contain ourselves. His is a fine-tuning that turns ‘true and kind’ more truthfully into ‘not untrue and not unkind.’ These are poems to live with and through, from the trenchant assertion of ‘They fuck you up. . .’, to the transcendent image-making of ‘High Windows’:
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
PhilipLarkin
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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