Philip Larkin: Desired Reading

June 7, 2012

Christopher Ricks

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The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin
edited and with an introduction and commentary by Archie Burnett
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 729 pp., $40.00                                                  

Those of us who have often invoked the great phrase of Keats—“the true voice of feeling”—have no less often been told that we are naive, since social and political contingencies mean that there is no such thing. Nevertheless, the true voice of feeling was what Philip Larkin sought and found, or rather the true voices.

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