'When I go down...I shall begin reading English literature. This occupation will take up the rest of my time until I am dead' - Letter of 23 October, 1942, from Larkin to Hamburger. Michael Hamburger's 'precarious relationship' with Philip Larkin lasted from their Oxford days - through a ten-year silence - to brief encounters before Larkin's death in 1985. In this moving memoir, Hamburger charts their troubled friendship through detailed commentaries on Larkin's correspondence. Insistent on leaving the letters 'to speak for themselves', Hamburger writes with poignant honesty about the poets' differences, such as quibbles over foreign poetry and taste in music.Previously unpublished, the letters reveal echoes of many of the persistent themes of Larkin's poetry - his work, obsession with death, loneliness, reluctance to travel and 'self-punishing austerity'. The memoir also includes a 1955 "TLS" review of "The Less Deceived", which Hamburger claims 'may have helped in a small way to make amends for the neglect that Larkin's work had suffered until that time'. In highlighting contradictions between Larkin's 'inmost nature' and his public persona, and in providing literary criticism of his poems and novels, this is an invaluable addition to our understanding of both poets.

Excerpt from Weather and Season: New Poems The shape of last year's boughs, cankered or grown, And where that stump is, one that died in blossom; Forget the bill's curve under the aerial masts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.