Philip Larkin Poetry Quotations

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.