Abstract
Philip Arthur Larkin became an undergraduate at the University of Oxford at the age of eighteen in the Michaelmas Term of 1940. Great Britain had been at war with Germany and Italy for more than a year but the University continued to run regular arts degree courses in addition to starting shorter courses of six months’ residence for service cadets. The composition of the student body in arts subjects was changing through the war; gradually the girls, at that period a minority, would come to outnumber the boys.
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Notes
Philip Larkin, Required Writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1983; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984) p. 23.
John Betjeman, An Oxford University Chest (London: J. Miles, 1938).
Philip Larkin, ‘Not the Place’s Fault’, first published in Umbrella (Spring 1959) and included in An Enormous Yes: In Memoriam Philip Larkin (1922–1985), ed. Harry Chambers (Cornwall: Peterloo Poets, 1986) p. 52.
Julian Hall, The Senior Commoner (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933) p. 119.
Gavin Bone, Beowulf in Modern Verse, with an Essay and Pictures (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1945) p. v. The words are from the Preface by G. H. B., Bone’s parent.
Ian Davie’s published works include Aviator Loquitor (London: Fortune Press, 1943)
and Piers Prodigal (London: Harvill, 1961)
and Roman Pentecost (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970)
He also edited Oxford Poetry, 1942–1943 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1943)
William Bell, Elegies (London, n.d.) and Mountains Beneath the Horizon (London: Faber and Faber, 1950).
Michael Meyer, ‘John Heath-Stubbs in the Forties’, Aquarius, vol. x (Winter 1978) p. 10.
B. C. Bloomfield, Philip Larkin: A Bibliography, 1933–1976 (London: Faber, 1980) to which all Larkin scholars are deeply indebted.
Sidney Keyes and Michael Meyer (eds), Eight Oxford Poets (London: Routledge, 1941). The anthology was rejected by T. S. Eliot at Faber, but accepted by Herbert Read acting as poetry advisor for Routledge (Meyer, ‘John Heath-Stubbs in the Forties’, p. 12).
See Larkin’s ‘Introduction’ to Jill (London: Fortune Press, 1946; Faber and Faber, 1964, 1975; New York: Overlook Press, 1976)
and for Wain’s memories of Oxford c. 1944 see Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1962)
and the chapter on Nevil Coghill in Dear Shadows: Portraits from Memory (London: Macmillan, 1986)
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© 1989 Anthony Curtis
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Curtis, A. (1989). Larkin’s Oxford. In: Salwak, D. (eds) Philip Larkin: The Man and his Work. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09700-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09700-5_2
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