Politics & Power Quote by Philip Larkin

"I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife"

Philip Larkin, Poet

About this Quote

Larkin’s line lands like a sly slap at the modern industry of “the craft talk,” where poetry gets packaged into a transferable skill set and the poet is expected to become a motivational speaker with footnotes. The joke is bawdy, but it’s also strategic: by comparing poetic method to marital sex, he drags the conversation out of the seminar room and into the realm of the private, the routine, the unshowy. It’s not just that it’s intimate; it’s that it’s unteachable in the way most meaningful habits are unteachable. You can describe the mechanics, but the description misses the thing.

The choice of “American universities” isn’t incidental. Larkin is needling a particular postwar cultural shift: the rise of institutionalized creative writing, professionalized authorship, and a transatlantic lecture circuit that turns poems into content and poets into branded explainers of their own mystique. His “these chaps” condescension performs what he preaches, refusing the earnestness those settings reward.

Underneath the punchline is a defensive aesthetic. Larkin believed in craftsmanship, but he distrusted self-mythologizing and the idea that art should arrive with a user manual. The subtext is: if you have to narrate your inspiration onstage, you’re already halfway to falsifying it. Like sex, writing is compromised the moment it’s performed for an audience that isn’t the intended partner - the page, the reader, the self.

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Topic	Poetry
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About the Author

Philip Larkin (August 9, 1922 - December 2, 1985) was a Poet from England.

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