Philip Larkin (100 page)

    
6.
   There is an echo of Shelley’s ‘O world! O life! O time!’ in ‘A Lament’.
The Poems of Shelley
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 643.

    
7.
   James Booth,
Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 169.

    
8.
   22 March 1972.
SL
, p. 454.

    
9.
   To Conquest, 31 May 1972.
SL
,
p. 458.

  
10.
   Brennan, pp. 86–7.

  
11.
   13 June 1972.
SL
,
pp. 459–60.

  
12.
   There may be a wry echo of ‘That lone lane does not exist’ in Hardy’s ‘Beyond the Last Lamp’.

  
13.
   Anthony Thwaite, personal communication, 22 April 2011. He also sent a handwritten copy to Anthony’s wife Ann, for inclusion in a book of manuscript poems she was assembling at the time, offering to rewrite it if he had gone too close to the left-hand edge of the paper.

  
14.
   Motion, p. 424. Not in
Complete Poems
.

  
15.
   25 November 1972.
SL
,
pp. 465–6.

  
16.
   29 November 1972.
SL
,
p. 466. Bloomfield’s
Philip Larkin: A Bibliography 1933–1976
was published by Faber in 1979.

  
17.
   
SL
,
p. 467.

  
18.
   18 January 1973.
SL
,
p. 471.

  
19.
   10 February.
SL
,
p. 473.

  
20.
   Georges Bataille,
Death and Sexuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), p. 12.

  
21.
   15 January 1973.
SL
,
p. 470.

  
22.
   
SL
,
p. 483.

  
23.
   Motion, p. 430.

  
24.
   Interview with
Paris Review
,
RW
, p. 62.

  
25.
   
The Poetical Works of Wordsworth
(London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 206.

  
26.
   ‘Adagia’, in Wallace Stevens,
Opus Posthumous
, ed. Samuel French Morse (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 165. Larkin follows Stevens rather than Robert Graves, who expresses the more conventional view: ‘If there’s no money in poetry neither is there poetry in money.’
Robert Graves,
Mammon and the Black Goddess
(London: Cassell, 1965), p. 3.

  
27.
   16 January 1971.
SL
,
p. 435.

  
28.
   Barbara Everett, ‘After Symbolism’, first published in
Essays in Criticism
in 1980; reprinted in Barbara Everett,
Poets in their Time
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 230–44.

  
29.
   Andrew Motion,
Philip Larkin
(London: Methuen, 1982).

  
30.
   17 October 1981.
SL
,
p. 658.

  
31.
   
SL
,
pp. 476–7.

  
32.
   The first two tutorial groups I taught on my arrival in the English Department in 1968 consisted of a single student and three students. By the mid-seventies tutorial sizes were up to seven and later increased to sixteen.

  
33.
   Motion, p. 391.

  
34.
   To Judy Egerton, 11 January 1974.
SL
, p. 498.

  
35.
   The tally was to rise to twenty-six with the addition of ‘Show Saturday’.

  
36.
   Motion, p. 435.

  
37.
   4 October 1973.
SL
, p. 489.

  
38.
   Motion, p. 438.

  
39.
   
SL
, pp. 494–5.

  
40.
   Motion, pp. 437–8.

  
41.
   Motion, p. 437; Neil Corcoran,
English Poetry Since 1940
(Harlow: Longman, 1993), p. 93; Seamus Heaney,
The Government of the Tongue
(London: Faber, 1988), pp. 19–20.

  
42.
   
SL
, p. 497.

  
43.
   Ibid., p. 496.

  
44.
   The present owner, Miriam Porter, has transformed and improved the house out of all recognition, and installed a blue plaque recording Larkin’s ownership. See ‘Newland Park Garden Party’,
AL
20 (October 2005), pp. 54–7.

  
45.
   DPL/2/3/39.

  
46.
   Britten lived nearly three years longer and resumed composition. When he died at the end of 1976 he was composing a work for voices and orchestra, ‘Praise We Great Men’, to words by Edith Sitwell.

  
47.
   
SL
, p. 502.

  
48.
   Ibid., p. 503.

  
49.
   DPL/1/8/18, pp. 55–64. Motion (p. 442) writes that he started ‘Aubade’ ‘on 11 March’. But there is no evidence for this. See
Complete Poems
, pp. 494–5.

  
50.
   In the then unpublished ‘Long roots moor summer to this side of earth’ (1954), ‘unresting’ had appeared in the gorgeous phrase ‘River-castles of unresting leaf’. Otherwise both words appear in Larkin’s poetry only in ‘The Trees’ and ‘Aubade’. R.J.C. Watt, Concordance, pp. 6–7, p. 521. Some readers may hear an echo of ‘the wind’s incomplete unrest’ in ‘Talking in Bed’.

  
51.
   Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Criticism
, l. p. 298.

  
52.
   Motion, pp. 443–5.

21: The End of the Party (1974–6)

    
1.
   Letter to Sutton, 26 July 1950. Not in
SL
.

    
2.
   To Thwaite, 11 July 1974.
SL
,
pp. 511–12.

    
3.
   Judy Egerton, interview with the author, 17 December 2010.

    
4.
   5 June 1974.
SL
,
p. 509.

    
5.
   Motion, p. 448.

    
6.
   Motion, p. 443.

    
7.
   
SL
, p. 512.

    
8.
   Ibid., p. 704.

    
9.
   See Terry Kelly, ‘The Black Album: Review of
Philip Larkin: Poems
’,
AL
32 (October 2011), pp. 33–4.

  
10.
   To Barry Bloomfield, 4 December 1974.
SL
,
p. 515.