Thank you for posting up this wonderful feature! Bennett is always a pleasure to listen to, and here he is speaking so eloquently about Larkin. Wonderful!
This was brilliant. Larkin is my favourite poet and inspired me in my own writing and Alan Bennett is, to quote a very cliched term, a national treasure. I had tears in my eyes.
I once met Alan Bennett in a shop told him he read poetry brilliantly and the this series got me into Philip Larkin which seem to really please him it was nice to pay a compliment to him which I really meant when he reads the poetry I understand it even the wh Auden
Thanks very much for this. Larkin is my favourite poet (and I'd argue the greatest poet of the twentieth century) and Alan Bennett my favourite playwright. Wonderful.
You may like the mathematician and polymath, Jacob Bronowski's poetry, jonno52? He doesn't really compare with the mastery of Philip Larkin but I think his ( Bronowski's ) poetry is well written modernist poetry. He was one of the greatest polymaths of the 20th century being a mathematician, writer and expert on the poet William Blake. He was a fan of modern poetry too and a friend of Dylan Thomas.
Thanks Mike. I know Bronowski's name well as a science historian and author of The Ascent of Man, but had no idea he was also a poet. I'll have to investigate! Looking at his Wiki page, he was clearly a remarkable man, and a polymath indeed.
Bloody Wonderful, have not seen this since 1990, bought the cassette tape in the early nineties, which had Houseman, Auden, Betjeman, McNiece and another I cannot recall, I know its a long shot, bur would you have any of the other poets to post, it would certainly make my day, thanks again for allowing me to wallow in the nostalgia .....
+superclippie On the audio cassette and in the book from the series there was 6 poets, - Thomas Hardy, AE Housman, John Betjeman, WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin.
OH YEAH! : TED HUGHES, THE EGREGIOUS CRETIN WHO DESTROYED THE MUCH GREATER: SYLVIA PLATH'S DIARIES AFTER HER TOO EARLY DEATH! THERE ARE THOSE WHO SAY HE DID SO BECAUSE HE RIFFED AND PLAGIARIZED HER IDEAS AND THUMB-NAIL SKETCHES! HUGHES ALWAYS STRUCK ME AS A DERIVATIVE NARCISSISTIC PIG! HUGHES WAS A REAL OBSEQUIOUS GRIFTER! HIS WORK IS VACUOUS TRIPE! HUGHES WAS A PATHETIC LITTLE POSER WHO TALKED AT YOU RATHER THAN TO YOU. VIS-A-VIS THE LATTER I KNOW WHERE-OF I SPEAK ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS.
Back in 1974, I had a note from school, to say that the English class would be covering Larkin, Wilde and Betjeman. The note was to inform our parents that "This Be The Verse" contained the 'F' word and to let the school know if they want their children excluded from that lesson. As far as I'm aware, we all attended. For the last five years, until last August, I worked as a TA in a secondary school, we didn't cover Larkin, I asked an English teacher if they would be allowed to teach "This Be The Verse", they looked at me as if I was mad, "I don't think that is suitable for young teens." I was informed. How sad for the children, and how uninformed of the educators that will hear 'fuck', and all its derivatives, bandied about the playground by most of those young teens. I believe they use it because they don't understand it's potential power and because they lack sufficient adjectives in their vocabularies.
The Larkin poems that were read. 'I Remember, I Remember' 'This be the Verse' 'Dockery and Son' 'High Windows' 'Annus Mirabilis' 'Going, Going' 'Toads Revisited' 'An Arundel Tomb' 'Aubade' 'The Trees'
