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[This entry was updated by Bruce K. Martin (Drake University) from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 200-211.]
In a time when popular reception of poetry was perhaps more tenuous than in any period since the Wordsworthian revolution, Philip Larkin managed to capture a loyal, wide, and growing audience of readers. He has been acclaimed the "unofficial poet laureate" of England and the "laureate of the common man," as a representative spokesman for the British sensibility since World War II. He emerged as the center, if not the starting point, of most critical debate over postwar British verse. He is the best known and most acclaimed—critically and popularly—of the figures who made up the so-called Movement in the early 1950s and as an avowed enemy of the literary modernism scorned by The Movement. His scant four collections of poems, written over thirty years, as well as the two novels he brought out shortly after the war, continue to go into new printings, hardcover and paperback, on both sides of the Atlantic.
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