Thread by @dean_frey

Remembering Philip Larkin on his birthday 🎂
📷 Fay Godwin, 1974
@NPGLondon
Kingsley Amis asked him if he'd ever thought about becoming the Poet Laureate.
"I dream about that sometimes - and wake up screaming. With any luck they'll pass me over."

I love when artists turn out to be photographers, whether serious or just the snapshot type. Here's Philip Larkin's portrait of Kingsley Amis. Amis's own caption of the photo: "Kingley Amis in 'writer' pose."

Philip Larkin by Humphrey Ocean
acrylic on canvas, 1984
@NPGLondon
"I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think? Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."

Robert Gottlieb called Philip Larkin "Britain's most famous postwar poet & misogynist." In "All What Jazz?", Larkin trashes everyone: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane.
A smile in Godfrey Argent's 1968 portrait; he's probably thinking something mean.

Here's the jazz Philip Larkin likes: Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, plus Tallis, Handel, Elgar. His #DesertIslandDiscs picks:
bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00…