Thoughts on Larkin?

I like Sympathy in White Major myself:

When I drop four cubes of ice
Chimingly in a glass, and add
Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,
And let a ten-ounce tonic void
In foaming gulps until it smothers
Everything else up to the edge,
I lift the lot in private pledge:
He devoted his life to others.

While other people wore like clothes
The human beings in their days
I set myself to bring to those
Who thought I could the lost displays;
It didn't work for them or me,
But all concerned were nearer thus
(Or so we thought) to all the fuss
Than if we'd missed it separately.

A decent chap, a real good sort,
Straight as a die, one of the best,
A brick, a trump, a proper sport,
Head and shoulders above the rest
How many lives would have been duller
Had he not been here below?
Here's to the whitest man I know -
Though white is not my favourite colour.

Excellent, especially as an introduction to poetry because his works are easy to read but hit hard.

>but hit hard

In what way? I found his stuff to be quite banal.

Represents everything I love about Britain:

1. Grim but subtly humorous outlook
2. Stoic and dignified
3. Pessimistic view of life and other people though lightened by consistent self-effacement
4. Racist
5. Eccentric but in a private manner, in his case about jazz and pornography

One of my favorite memories in the last five years was when I found a copy of his collected poems in the university library and stayed late reading them until I was the only one there. A great experience.

Because they are frank while also retaining their beauty. Larkin's poems often read like Smiths / Morrissey songs I find.

>Mirabilus

Mirabilis*

Kingsley Amis supported him so i discovered him that way.

Ive read his poetry, havent his fiction. Is it any good?

>his close personal friend supported him
no shit

His ability to package delicate imagery along with concise conclusion is second to none. By joining realism and sentimentalism he reflects post-war Britain in all of its nostalgic gloom.

REFERENCING BACK
That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.

Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique negroes blew
Out of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime.

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently, we could have kept it so.

awful

He has great ways of expressing facing death, failure, the passing of time- universal things. I can kind of see how you might see it as banal, because the themes are such common human ones, but it's all in the words.

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.