Philip Larkin

Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet and novelist whose spare, plain-spoken verse made him the most admired English-language poet of the post-war Movement generation. Born in Coventry in 1922, the son of the city treasurer, he attended King Henry VIII School and went up to St John's College, Oxford in 1940, where he formed lasting friendships with Kingsley Amis and Bruce Montgomery.

Rejected for military service because of poor eyesight, he took a librarianship at Wellington in Shropshire after graduating, beginning a parallel professional life that would last to the end of his days. He published two novels, Jill in 1946 and A Girl in Winter in 1947, before turning back to poetry.

From 1955 he was librarian at the University of Hull, transforming the Brynmor Jones Library into one of the finest in Britain while writing the three slim volumes that secured his reputation: The Less Deceived in 1955, The Whitsun Weddings in 1964, and High Windows in 1974. Poems such as "Church Going," "An Arundel Tomb," and "Aubade" balanced colloquial English against austere meditation on death, work, and missed chances.

He edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse in 1973 and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1965. He declined the Poet Laureateship in 1984. Letters and diaries published after his death from oesophageal cancer in 1985 sparked controversy over private prejudices but did not dislodge his standing as a major lyric voice.

The given name Philip derives from the Greek Philippos, combining philos meaning "loving" and hippos meaning "horse," producing the sense "lover of horses." An old Macedonian and apostolic name, it suited the bookish Englishman who carried it through Hull's quiet rooms.