August 9 marks the centenary of Philip Larkin, one of the most admired poets of the twentieth century. When Larkin died of esophageal cancer in 1985 at 63, he was England’s most beloved living poet.

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Not everything about Thwaite’s edition is so muddled, of course. Not everything about Thwaite’s edition is so ...

There is no direct train from London to Hull, in Yorkshire. You have to change at Doncaster. Philip Larkin used to claim that he went on working there because literary curiosity-seekers (not to speak ...

The world of Philip Larkin’s verse is far from glamorous. His natural habitat was English suburbia, a realm of grey dawns, hollow afternoons and low horizons. He spent most of his adult life working ...

The poems of British master Philip Larkin (1922–1985), one of the great mid-century poets in English, have had a frustrating life since the death of their author: this is the third book of Larkin ...

The author of the immortal opening couplet, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do," the poet Philip Larkin (1922-85) was in 2008 voted “the greatest British writer" of ...

For the first time, Philip Larkin’s poems are given a comprehensive commentary. This draws critically upon, and substantially extends, the accumulated scholarship on Larkin, and covers closely ...