A reading of a Larkin poem ‘Sympathy in White Major’ contains perhaps the most mouth-watering description of someone making a gin and tonic to be found in all English poetry. But it is also, like many Philip Larkin poems, about the relation between the self and society, between the individual […]
A reading of a classic Larkin poem Philip Larkin completed ‘Mr Bleaney’ in May 1955, and it appeared nine years later in his third major volume of poems, The Whitsun Weddings (1964). The poem is about a professional man renting a room in a woman’s house, and musing on the […]
A reading of Larkin’s poem How we should analyse Philip Larkin’s poetry depends on what phase of his career we’re dealing with. In ‘Send No Money’, Larkin examines the gulf between our expectations of the world and the somewhat less satisfying realities the world provides us with. It is also […]