Philip Larkin / The Art of Poetry

Philip Larkin

The Art of Poetry 

No. 30

Interviewed by Robert Phillips

Summer 1982
No. 84

“Temperamentally and geographically remote,” the Times Literary Supplement wrote of Philip Larkin, “he has refused almost all invitations to judge, recite, review, lecture, pontificate, or to be interviewed.”

When the notion of securing a Paris Review interview with Larkin arose, the staff was not sanguine. Much to the staff’s delight, Larkin consented warily, stating that he wasn’t crazy about the idea, but that “The Paris Review series is, of course, known to me, and I can see I should be in good company.” In the case of this interview, Larkin did not let down his guard sufficiently to be interviewed in person. He stipulated that the interview be conducted entirely by mail: “You will get much better answers that way.” He took nearly five months to answer the initial set of questions sent to him at his home in Hull, England, stating, “It has taken rather a long time because, to my surprise, I found writing it suffocatingly boring.”

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Amelina set aside most of her writing to document war crimes.
Photograph: Daniel Mordzinski

Poem About a Crow: a work by the killed Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina

Amelina has died, aged 37, from injuries sustained in a Russian missile strike in Kramatorsk

Monday 3 July 2023

Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian novelist, poet and public intellectual. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of her country in 2022, she set aside most of her writing to document and research war crimes.

Amelina understood the risks she ran with this work, both as a citizen who chose to stay in her country during war, and as a writer facing an invading army bent on destroying Ukrainian national identity.

 

Banksy

For Ukrainians, poetry isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity during war

This article is more than 6 months old

Poetry is fulfilling a very human need – to make sense of the senseless and tell their stories

Charlotte Higgins
Friday 9 December 2022

“There is so much poetry coming out of Ukraine now that I’m barely keeping up with it,” the Ukrainian translator and scholar Oksana Maksymchuk tells me. It is hardly the first thing that one would expect of a country at war. But poetry’s ability to, as she says, “crystallise a particular moment in time, or an emotion that is fleeting”, has led to an outpouring of poems – not so much emotion recollected in tranquillity, as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Often these poems are posted by their authors on social media; the literary journal