Philip Larkin

Compilación de la poesía esencial de Philip Larkin, el gran poeta ingles de la segunda mitad del siglo XX. "Escritor ácido, controvertido y misántropo que en sus versos vadeó como nadie las aguas de la incorreccion".Gonzalo Torne, El Mundo "No acabo de entender a esos tipos que van de universidad en universidad dando charlas y contando como escriben sus poemas: es como ir por ahi contandole a todo el mundo como le haces el amor a tu mujer."Philip Larkin Philip Larkin es uno de los poetas capitales del siglo xx. Su tono mordaz y conversacional, su mirada inclemente, donde se refleja una emocion honda pero siempre contenida, asi como su espiritu urbano, su peculiar sentido del humor y su capacidad para detectar las miserias de la sociedad contemporanea, le han convertido en uno de los poetas mas leidos de todos los tiempos, favorito incluso de lectores poco habituados a la poesia. En este volumen se reune, por primera vez en castellano, el cuerpo esencial de la poesia de Larkin, desde Engaños, el primer libro en que domino su voz, pasando por Las bodas de Pentecostes y Ventanas altas, quiza sus dos obras maestras, hasta algunos poemas finales y dispersos, como el estremecedor "Albad

When Philip Larkins High Windows first appeared, Kingsley Amis spoke for a large and loyal readership when he wrote: Larkins admirers need only be told that he is as good as ever here, if not slightly better.Like Betjeman and Hardy, Larkin is a poet who can move a large audience - without betraying the highest artistic standards.The poems in High Windows illustrate Larkins unrivalled ability to bring lyrical expression to ordinary, urban lives. It is a gift that makes him one of the most truly popular of the twentieth centurys poets.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) remains Englands best-loved poet - a writer matchlessly capable of evoking his native land and of touching all readers from the most sophisticated intellectual to the proverbial common reader. The late John Betjeman observed that this tenderly observant poet writes clearly, rhythmically, and thoughtfully about what all of us can understand. Behind this modest description lies a poet who made greatness look, in Miltons prescription, simple, sensuous and passionate. This collection, first published in 1967, contains many of his best-loved poems, including The Whitsun Weddings, An Arundel Tomb, Days, Mr Bleaney and MCMXIV.

Lose yourself in this tale of young love by the best-loved English poet of the past 100 years.(Sunday Times)Katherine Lind is a refugee who has become a librarian in a wartime Northern town. One winters day, she receives a telegram: and her thoughts drift back to falling in love with her pen-pal, Robin Fennel, on a glorious summer exchange. But on his return from the army, their reunion is not what they imagined ...Beautiful.Nina StibbeRemarkable . Diffused poetry.Simon GarfieldHighly sensitive . Reminiscent of Virginia Woolf.Joyce Carol OatesFunny and profoundly sad.Andrew MotionStrange and beautiful ... Short, intense and obsessed with the tiny ballets of social interaction, they could only have been written by someone very young (the writer they most remind me of is Sally Rooney) ... Weird but brilliant ... Zingily contemporary.Sunday Times

This entirely new edition brings together all of Philip Larkins poems. In addition to those in Collected Poems (1988), and in the Early Poems and Juvenilia (2005), some unpublished pieces from Larkins typescripts and workbooks are included, as well as verse (by turns scurrilous, satirical, affectionate, and sentimental) tucked away in his letters. The manuscript and printed sources have been scrutinized afresh; more detailed accounts than hitherto available of the sources of the text and of dates of composition are provided; and previous accounts of composition dates have been corrected. Variant wordings from Larkins typescripts and the early printings are recorded. For the first time, the poems are given a comprehensive commentary. This draws critically upon, and substantially extends, the accumulated scholarship on Larkin, and covers closely relevant historical contexts, persons and places, allusions and echoes, and linguistic usage. Due prominence is given to the poets comments on his poems, which often outline the circumstances that gave rise to a poem, or state what he was trying to achieve. Larkin played down his literariness, but his poetry enrichingly alludes to and echoes the writings of many others; Archie Burnetts commentary establishes him as a more complex and more literary poet than many readers have suspected.

The North Ship, Philip Larkins earliest volume of verse, was first published in August 1945. The introduction, by Larkin himself, explains the circumstances of its publication and the influences whic

Michaelmas term, 1940. 18-year-old John Kemp has come down from Lancashire to Oxford University to begin his scholarship studying English. But when he invents an imaginary sister to win the attention of a rich but unreliable friend, and then falls in love for real, undergraduate life becomes its own strange, complex world .The best-loved English poet of the past 100 years.Sunday TimesAbsolutely contemporary - perhaps even prophetic.Joyce Carol OatesRemarkable . A book about innocence.Simon GarfieldA cryptic literary manifesto [about] discovering a literary personality, and the consolation art can provide.Andrew Motion

Jill es la primera y quizá más conocida novela de Philip Larkin. Considerada una de las grandes obras de la sociedad inglesa de los años cuarenta su crueldad tan en detalle, así como su belleza implacable no han dejado de seducir a las distintas generaciones que se han acercado a ella. Durante los primeros años de la II Guerra Mundial, John Kemp, un joven estudiante de clase humilde, llega desde un pequeño nucleo de provincias a la ciudad universitaria donde cursara sus estudios. En medio de un ambiente lugubre, deprimido y profundamente intimidatorio elegira, como salvoconducto emocional, a una chica anonima sobre la que dibujara una identidad alternativa, y la bautizara con el nombre de Jill. A partir de ese momento, comenzara el movimiento feroz de una espiral obsesiva sobre ella hasta que los acontecimientos experimentan un giro sorpresivo que pondran al protagonista contra las cuerdas. Su vida y sus aspiraciones, asi como sus deseos y anhelos daran paso a un relato poetico y grandioso de uno de los maestros de la literatura inglesa de los años cincuenta.

Letters Home gives access to the last major archive of Larkins writing to remain unpublished: the letters to members of his family. These correspondences help tell the story of how Larkin came to be the writer and the man he was: to his father Sydney, a conservative anarchist and admirer of Hitler, who died relatively early in Larkins life; to his timid depressive mother Eva, who by contrast, lived long, and whose final years were shadowed by dementia; and to his sister Kitty, the sparse surviving fragment of whose correspondence with her brother gives an enigmatic glimpse of a complex and intimate relationship- But it was the years during which he and his sister looked after their mother in particular that shaped the writer we know so well: a number of poems written over this time are for her, and the mood of pain, shadow and despondency that characterises his later verse draws its strength from his experience of the long, lonely years of her senility. One surprising element in the volume, however, is the joie de vivre shown in the large number of witty and engaging drawings of himself and Eva, as Young Creature and Old Creature, with which he enlivens his letters throughout the three decades of her widowhood. This important edition, meticulously edited by Larkins biographer, James Booth, is a key piece of scholarship that completes the portrait of this most cherished of English poets.

Since its publication in 1988, Philip Larkins Collected Poems has become essential reading on any poetry bookshelf. This new edition returns to Larkins own deliberate ordering of his poems, presenting, in their original sequence, his four published books: The North Ship, The Less Deceived, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. It also includes an appendix of poems that Larkin published in other places, from his juvenilia to his final years - some of which might have appeared in a late book, if he had lived. Preserving everything that he published in his lifetime, this new Collected Poems returns the reader to the book Larkin might have intended.

Edición bilingüe: castellano-inglés

The most cherished of poets, Philip Larkin is a writer with an unrivalled ability to touch readers with his evocations of English life. The Whitsun Weddings, his first volume with Faber and Faber, was published in 1964. This Faber Modern Classics edition includes a foreword by Alan Johnson MP.''Larkin, with his (in the best sense) provincial eye, and his unparalleled ear, is the supreme writer of post-war England.'' Telegraph''Larkin''s originality is palpable . . . Who else uses an essentially conversational idiom to achieve such a variety of emotional effects? Who else takes us, and takes us so often, from sunlit levity to mellifluous gloom? And let it be emphasised that Larkin is never ''depressing''.'' Martin Amis

"The Sunday Sessions" consists of twenty-six poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980 - reportedly, each on a Sunday, after lunch with John Weeks, a sound engineer and colleague of the poet. The tapes, which contain work from Larkin''s first major collection, "The North Ship", as well as poems from his best-known collections, "The Whitsun Weddings" and "High Windows", remained ''lost'' for over two decades, lying on a shelf in the garage in which they were recorded. Since their rediscovery they have been the subject of widespread media attention, including a BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour documentary. Their contents are here published in full for the first time. The running time is approx 1 hour/1 disc.

Aunque a Philip Larkin se le reconoce especialmente por su gran obra poética, sus dos únicas incursiones en el mundo de la novela dan fe de su talento narrativo. En Jill, una soberbia ficción de tintes autobiograficos sobre los penosos años de la guerra, un estudiante de Oxford combate el tedio inventandose un romance con una joven que acabara convirtiendose en una obsesion autodestructiva.

Uno de los grandes poemarios de Philip Larkin, Las Bodas de Pentecostés, causó una profunda convulsión en los medios literarios británicos cuando se publicó por primera vez en 1964. La insolencia, el lenguaje aspero y coloquial, y el tono provocativamente antirromantico convirtieron a Larkin en el maximo representante de la poesia de la posguerra britanica y en un imprescindible innovador de las letras europeas.