Product Description
This study of Philip Larkin challenges recent attempts to interpret Larkin's poems by decoding their supposed religious, political or sexual subtexts. Booth argues that historical and social circumstances are, as Larkin himself believed, the context not the substance of his work. He treats Larkin as a deliberate artist, rather than as a political symptom or sexual case-history. By extensive reference to the letters, interviews and prose writings he shows that Larkin's vivid self-image as a patriotic Tory bachelor was an indulgence confined to his later "required" writing. Close readings of a range of Larkin's best loved, as well as lesser known, poems demonstrate that they operate on a more profound imaginative level; either treating universal themes, or alternatively dramatizing and ironising ideological stereotypes in order to create embodiments of experience beyond or beneath ideology. ... Read more

Product Description
Larkin's poems are often regarded as falling somewhere between the traditional 'plain' and the more contemporary 'postmodern' categories. This study undertakes a comprehensive linguistic and historical study of the plain style tradition in poetry, its relationship with so-called 'difficult' poetry, and its particular realization in the cultural and historical context of 20th-century Britain. The author examines the nature of poetry as a type of discourse, the elements of, and factors in, the development of literary styles, a close rhetorical examination of Larkin's poems within the described poetic frameworks, and his position in the British twentieth-century poetic canon. ... Read more

Product Description
This collection brings together essays by established commentators on Larkin's work and by younger critics: from England, Northern Ireland, the USA, Canada, Belgium and Hungary. Individual essays examine Larkin's novels and poetry in the light of psychoanalytical, postmodern, postcolonial and Bakhtinian theories. This collection shows that Larkin's work continues to yield fresh and sometimes surprising readings. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The traditional vs. the modern in jazz
I will admit that I am somewhat partial to Philip Larkin, warts and all.He is one of the few poets of the 20th-Century whose work I can read for more than, say, ten minutes and be entertained and edified.I have also enjoyed his literary criticism, as well as a volume of his letters.So I decided to try out his music criticism - jazz, specifically.From 1961 to 1971 Larkin wrote a monthly column for the "Daily Telegraph" in which he reviewed jazz recordings.They are collected, with an after-the-fact introduction, in ALL WHAT JAZZ.

Alas, at this remove, reading the book is a little like panning for gold: one has to sift through a lot of dirt and dross.But at least you know in advance that there will be an acceptable percentage of gold.Larkin's acerbic wit and amiable curmudgeonry (admittedly, an oxymoron of sorts) are in full and frequent display.Together with his opinionated enthusiasm, they elevate the book over any other conceivable collection of jazz record reviews from 40 to 50 years ago.

Not surprisingly, jazz to Larkin is traditional jazz, from before 1945 and bebop."I can recognize jazz because it makes me tap my foot, grunt affirmative exhortations, or even get up and caper round the room.If it doesn't do this, then however musically interesting or spiritually adventurous or racially praiseworthy it is, it isn't jazz."Along the same lines:"The jazz that conquered the world (and me) was the jazz of Armstrong, Ellington, Bix and the Chicagoans.What Parker, Monk, Miles and the Jazz Misanthropes are playing can be Afro-American music for all I care, but it isn't jazz."

At times Larkin realizes that he is a cultural fossil and that the jazz that won his allegiance was in a death spiral.Among the nuggets of the book are his sporadic attempts at analyzing and explaining its demise.A lot of it, he writes, had to do with changes in the relationship of the American Negro within American society."The Negro is in a paradoxical position: he is looking for the jazz that isn't jazz.Either he will find it, or - and I say this in all seriousness - jazz will become an extinct form of music as the ballad is an extinct form of literature, because the society that produced it has gone."

Perhaps the most noteworthy passages of the book are when Larkin goes beyond jazz and discusses its transformation in the broader context of cultural modernism.He sees Parker as a practitioner of modernism in jazz, just as Pound and Picasso were in their respective fields (the three chosen for alliterative effect)."I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it.This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by Parker, Pound or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure.It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power."

Larkin is at his peak in creatively heaping scorn on some of the preeminent figures of what was then "modern" jazz:Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and - especially - John Coltrane."With John Coltrane metallic and passionless nullity gave way to exercises in gigantic absurdity, great boring excursions on not-especially-attractive themes during which all possible changes were rung, extended investigations of oriental tedium, long-winded and portentous demonstrations of religiosity.It was with Coltrane * * * that jazz started to be ugly on purpose."

I've highlighted Larkin's prejudices.If they are in line with yours, and if you are willing to wade through scads of reviews of now-forgotten records and artists from decades ago, you should find ALL WHAT JAZZ worthwhile.Otherwise, the book is probably of interest only to the Larkin compleatist - a category on whose door I seem to be knocking.

The Greatest
Larkin was a great writer and an honest critic, and this is the best-written book of popular music criticism available.
The other reviews posted for this book on Amazon are wrong to imply that Larkin's tastes were timid or stuffy. In fact his heros were Henry Allen, Pee-Wee Russell, Bessie Smith, Earl Hines, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Jabbo Smith, Jack Teagarden and so on. These are among greatest musicians and innovators of jazz.
Yes, Larkin thought Charlie Parker was overrated; he couldn't stand Coltrane; he thought Miles Davis was a bore. But don't be afraid to read why he thought so and you may learn something about your own heros.

Tedium, Thy Name is Larkin
All What Jazz, indeed.While Philip Larkin was a poet of some note, I'm thinking it probably didn't pay real well.So he got a gig, doing a monthly jazz column for the Daily Telegraph.He used this gig to blatherendlessly of the superiority of Dixieland and trad jazz, and the travestyand utter disgrace that is modern jazz, i.e., bebop, hard bop, and horrorabove horrors, the dreaded free jazz.Indeed, the book opens with a quotefrom Miles Davis, trashing Ornette Coleman's music.Nothing like hidingbehind an icon, there, Phil.Miles, who was the Charles Barkley of hisday, would regularly say outrageous things for effect and"press."In print, the words look harsh - the printed page doesnot capture Miles's raspy cackle following his "quote."But theprinted page does capture quite well the clammy, pasty discomfort thatLarkin feels for modern jazz.Yes, pip-pip, give me the old Dixielandbands that I loved as a lad in prep school! OK, fine.A nice remembrancepiece, on occasion, is nice.A barbed attack on an artist or genre canalso be thought-provoking.(I've been known to dabble in such things...) However, Larkin did it EVERY MONTH for 10 years.Talk about a one trickpony, in an era that spawned creative genius and obliterated musicalboundaries, Old Frumpy Phil is pining for the syncopated rhythms of hispast.He would allow for Duke and Basie, but he had little use for Bird orMonk, and if he wasn't outright trashing them, he was smugly doling outleft-handed compliments.But don't get him started on Trane, or, Godforbid, Ornette.Truly the only book that I have read in anger, and out ofmorbid curiosity.Bottom line: it wasn't worth it.Save your money, orbetter yet, go buy a Coltrane disk!

Diary of a sourpuss
When a reviewer calls Coltrane's playing 'possessed continually by an almost Scandinavian unloveliness', and questions Thelonious Monk's sense of rhythm, you start to get a feel for what kind of jazz he'll go for. Andyou'd be right: nothing ever seems to please Larkin quite so much asold-school big band or dixieland, and he's not afraid to say so. Still,he's a good writer and all, so if you're looking for a collection of jazzreviews from the 60s written by a slightly stuffy guy who never really gotover Woody Herman, this is the book for you. ... Read more

Product Description
Since his death in 1985, Philip Larkin's reputation as a writer has undergone a profound and dramatic transformation. The essays in this volume offer a lively, provocative response to such issues as sexual politics, national identity and postcolonialism on the work of a widely regarded writer. ... Read more

Product Description
A meeting at Oxford University during World War II signalled the beginning of a lifelong friendship between two outstanding contributors to 20th century English literature: Philip Larkin, poet, and Kingsley Amis, the prolific novelist. Selected from correspondence written between 1943 and 1985, these letters offer an entertaining and illuminating insight into the prejudices, exasperations and in-jokes of two literary greats. A linking commentary complements the writers' own words as they relate events in their personal lives, report on their work in progress, and generally rail against the modem world. ... Read more

Product Description
The book opens with works written under the pseudonym 'Brunette Coleman', including the two novellas, Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Bride's, and the poem sequence Sugar and Spice. The remainder of the volume is devoted to the unfinished drafts of two novels, No For An Answer and A New World Symphony, on which Larkin worked after the completion of A Girl in Winter. It ends with two short debats of 1950 and 1951, which pungently dramatise his sense of failure as a novelist and his rejection of marriage. ... Read more