Philip Larkin – Interesting Literature

The Forgotten Movement Poet: The Poetry of Jonathan Price

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discusses the work of the best 1950s poet you’ve never heard of

Say the name ‘Jonathan Price’ and people are likely to think of the actor who has played characters such as the psychopathic Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies and the fanatical High Sparrow in Game of Thrones. But the actor is Jonathan Pryce: this article is about Jonathan Price. Who was he? Jonathan Price was the editor and poet whose work was admired by Philip Larkin, among others. Yet the poet Jonathan Price (1931-85) remains not just little-known (the usual topic of this blog) but almost entirely unknown.

A Short Analysis of Philip Larkin’s ‘Self’s the Man’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Self’s the Man’ was completed in November 1958, and was published in Philip Larkin’s third major poetry collection, The Whitsun Weddings, in 1964. In some ways it might be regarded as the lighter precursor to a more elusive later poem, ‘Sympathy in White Major’, which we’ve analysed here. But the present post constitutes some notes towards an analysis of ‘Self’s the Man’.

A Short Analysis of Philip Larkin’s ‘Essential Beauty’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Essential Beauty’ (1962) is one of several poems Philip Larkin wrote about the gulf between advertising and the real world. Like another poem he wrote in 1962, ‘Sunny Prestatyn’, ‘Essential Beauty’ examines the promises that billboard advertisements make to us and how starkly the reality of people’s lives differs from such aspirational messages. You can read ‘Essential Beauty’ here.

A Short Analysis of Philip Larkin’s ‘Ambulances’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Ambulances’ was completed in January 1961 and published in Philip Larkin’s third major collection, The Whitsun Weddings (1964). You can read ‘Ambulances’ here; this post offers some notes towards an analysis of Larkin’s poem.

A Short Analysis of Philip Larkin’s ‘Going, Going’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

We’ve analysed a fair few Philip Larkin poems over the last year or so, and had largely said everything we had to say about his work. But we’ve been inspired to write about ‘Going, Going’ because of popular demand, of a kind.