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 […]
A reading of a Larkin poem ‘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’, […]
A reading of a classic poem about advertising ‘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 […]
A reading of a classic Larkin poem ‘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. ‘Ambulances’, in summary, is a poem about death. The […]
A reading of one of Larkin’s most famous poems 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 […]