Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love - Softcover

Booth, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1408851695 ISBN 13: 9781408851692

Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2016

Synopsis

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is one of the most beloved poets in English. Yet after his death a largely negative image of the man himself took hold; he has been portrayed as a racist, a misogynist and a narcissist. Larkin scholar James Booth, for seventeen years a colleague of the poet's at the University of Hull, offers a very different portrait. Drawn from years of research and a wide variety of Larkin's friends and correspondents, this is the most comprehensive portrait of the poet available.

Booth traces the events that shaped Larkin in his formative years, from his early life when his political instincts were neutralized by exposure to his father's controversial Nazi values. He studies how the academic environment and the competition he felt with colleagues such as Kingsley Amis informed not only Larkin's poetry, but also his little-known ambitions as a novelist.

Through the places and people Larkin encountered over the course of his life, including Monica Jones, with whom he had a tumultuous but enduring relationship, Booth pieces together an image of a rather reserved and gentle man, whose personality--and poetry--have been misinterpreted by decades of academic study. Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love reveals the man behind the words as he has never been seen before.

About this title

About the Author

James Booth is the literary adviser and coeditor of the Philip Larkin Society. He is the author of two studies of Larkin's work, Philip Larkin: Writer in 1991 and Philip Larkin: The Poet's Plight. He has also edited a collection of Larkin's early stories and poems and a volume of critical essays, New Larkins for Old. He has recently retired from the Department of English at the University of Hull, where he was a colleague of Larkin's for seventeen years.

Review

"Booth shows Larkin’s variety, from near-religious adoration to lasciviousness to slashingly witty... A consummated dream of a literary biography." ―Booklist (starred review)

"A valuable critical biography . . . Authoritative insights into the poetry."―Michael Dirda, Washington Post

"Booth largely succeeds in ennobling Larkin through his contradictions, depicting a man for whom life was much more than, as he once wrote, ‘first boredom, then fear.’" ―The New Yorker

"[Booth] has achieved a proper balance, rare in books about writers, between the life and the art . . . a salutary reminder that biography need be neither iconoclastic nor reveal dark secrets to help readers understand the subtle richness of a complex man." ―Wall Street Journal

"Booth is, quite simply, the ultimate Larkin enthusiast ... Booth is absolutely excellent on the work ... To read this book through, turning back to the poems in sequence, is to appreciate Larkin’s development more intimately than has been possible before." ―Evening Standard

"Superb ... Booth’s psychology is subtler than Motion’s and more convincing. His achievement is to paint a satisfying and believably complex picture ... Compelling and makes clear how unmistakeably Larkin belongs among the greats." ―Spectator

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1408851695
• ISBN 13: 9781408851692
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 570