Category: Readings
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Born Yesterday: Philip Larkin at 100
The 100th anniversary of the poet Philip Larkin’s birth took place earlier this week. Larkin is an important poet for me, personally, yet I still somehow manage to underestimate the hold he has on the imagination of the British public. For better or worse, if you mention poetry in this country to someone who doesn’t…
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The Long Slide: Philip Larkin’s ‘High Windows’
Most writers dislike most of what they write most of the time but the savagery of Philip Larkin’s self-criticism still has the power to shock. In his workbook, the final three words of ‘High Windows‘ – ‘and is endless’ – are replaced by ‘and fucking piss’. This is not very helpful, given I’m going to…
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Boom, Boom: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘View of the Capitol’
Elizabeth Bishop is (maybe) most famous for her poems of place: she spent much of her life living in South America and wrote collections called Questions of Travel and Geography III (there was no ‘I’ or ‘II’). ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’ was written while working at the Library of Congress…
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Into My Own: The Misanthropy of Robert Frost
Poems are not social in any normal sense of the word. You have to spend a lot of time alone to write or read them. The reader might share them or even read them to someone else (it does happen) and you can say that this is a kind of socialness. Here we get a…
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Pandemic Poetry
Poets are often thought of as more solitary than most, but a poem is never entirely solitary – it’s a signal sent up into the sky, trusting someone will receive it. Hoping, anyway. Perhaps that’s one reason why they are everywhere right now. Simon Armitage has already written his first Coronavirus poem. You can follow…
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