Christopher Hitchens reviews Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica.
[Somehow from Larkin’s drab, resentful life he evolved] his own sour strain and syncopation of Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity.” And without [his personal] synthesis of gloom and angst, we could never have had his “Aubade,” a waking meditation on extinction that unstrenuously contrives a tense, brilliant counterpoise between the stoic philosophies of Lucretius and David Hume, and his own frank terror of oblivion.
January 3rd, 2016 at 3:14PM
[…] from Philip Larkin’s drab, resentful life he evolved] his own sour strain and syncopation of Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of […]