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Philip larkin by andrew motion5/20/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() A martini, Motion tells him, before realising something else might be on offer. The fairy-tale quest continues at Oxford, where Motion encounters the elderly Auden, who stations himself by a Hockney painting of a naked youth before asking him ‘what like’. Perhaps this is the price to be paid for close access to the poet’s shade. Motion is not vocally perturbed by this, then or now. Soon he is staying over at Keynes’s house, where his host pulls back the sheets in the morning to admire the young man’s legs. ‘I wanted something more exalted,’ declares a disappointed Motion.īack at home, he is surprised to learn that Brooke’s literary executor, Geoffrey Keynes, lives nearby. It is a strangely anticlimactic moment: no poetry is recited in this ‘corner of a foreign field’, not even ‘The Soldier’. Some sun-baked wanderings later, the white sarcophagus is located. One summer Andrew Motion and his fellow sixth-formers take off for Skyros, where the future poet laureate plans to track down Brooke’s grave. I t all starts with a Rupert Brooke complex. ![]()
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