Books, Arts & Manners: Motion Sickness

Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, by Andrew Motion (Farrar, Straus, 592 pp., $35)

PHILIP LARKIN was a dedicated poet. His three volumes, distinguished by a fine accuracy of language and a wholly individual subject-matter, became an English classic in his own lifetime. Of course, there was other writing—two novels, book reviews, criticism of jazz records—though all this remained marginal, if time-consuming, compared with the central poetic achievement. Nevertheless, it constituted a “writer’s life,” and Andrew Motion was right to choose this as the subtitle of his biography.

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Anthony Hartley

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Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, by Andrew Motion (Farrar, Straus, 592 pp., $35)

PHILIP LARKIN was a dedicated poet. His three volumes, distinguished by a fine accuracy of language and a wholly individual subject-matter, became an English classic in his own lifetime. Of course, there was other writing—two novels, book reviews, criticism of jazz records—though all this remained marginal, if time-consuming, compared with the central poetic achievement. Nevertheless, it constituted a “writer’s life,” and Andrew Motion was right to choose this as the subtitle of his biography.