English poet. His father Sydney was City Treasurer of Coventry. Philip was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry. By the age of 16 he was already having poetry published in the school magazine, The Coventrian. In 1940 he went to St. John's College, Oxford, to study English. On graduating (with first-class honours) in 1943 he became chief librarian of the municipal library in Wellington, Shropshire. In 1946 he began a job as assistant librarian at University College Leicester; in 1950 he was appointed one of two sub-librarians at Queen's University Belfast. In 1955 he became Librarian of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, a post he held until his death. His first volume of poetry, "The North Ship", met with minimal response when published in 1945. It was followed by two novels, "Jill" (1946) and "A Girl in Winter" (1947). It was his second book of poetry, "The Less Deceived" (1955), which established him as a poet. The subject-matter of Larkin's poetry is resolutely unglamorous: British provincial life, public transport, sexual dissatisfaction, boredom, illness and death. His tone however is resigned and comic as often as it is melancholy. He was also the Daily Telegraph's jazz correspondent, and a collection of his reviews was published in 1970 as "All What Jazz". Among the many awards he received were the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the W.H. Smith Award. In 1975 he was made a Commander of the British Empire. In 1976 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation of Hamburg.

Towards the end of Larkin's life his output became very scarce: between the publication of his fourth book of poetry, "High Windows", in 1974, and his death, only 8 of his poems were published. When in 1984 he declined the offer of the post of Poet Laureate it was on the grounds that he was not able to produce poetry for state occasions. In accordance with his will, his diaries were burned after his death. In 1992, however, a selection of his letters was published. This caused controversy by making public his racist tendencies and interest in pornography. He never married, but from 1983 until his death he lived with the lecturer Monica Jones, whom he had first met in Leicester.

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Philip Larkin

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