[In the following essay, Thwaite weaves Larkin's own commentary on his work into a chronological overview of his corpus.]

There is a certain irony about sitting down to write a critical paper on the poetry of Philip Larkin, when one remembers some remarks of Larkin's about 'poetry as syllabus' and 'the dutiful mob that signs on every September.' Larkin needs no prolegomena, no exegesis: there is no necessary bibliography, no suggested reading, except the poems themselves. In a straightforward Words-worthian sense, he is a man speaking to men (though his detractors might put it that he is too often simply a chap chatting to chaps). Although few of the poems need any background knowledge beyond that which any reader of English may be supposed to command, when such knowledge is necessary Larkin himself has generally provided it, in his rare but always relevant and commonsensical statements about his work. Beyond that, I can only stand witness to my conviction that he is our finest living poet—and not in any 'Victor Hugo, hélas' sense—and go on to draw out and underline what seem to me to be his themes, his special voice and his peculiar excellences.

Although Larkin made little impact as a poet until the publication of The Less Deceived in 1955, when he was 33, he had started to write and to publish much earlier. In a fugitive essay in the Coventry arts magazine, Umbrella (Vol. I, No. 3, Summer 1959), he spoke of writing ceaselessly in his schooldays: 'now verse, which I sewed up into little books, now prose, a thousand words a night after homework.' His first publication, apart from the school magazine of King Henry VIII School in Coventry, was a poem in The Listener of November 28th 1940, when he was 18. This (titled 'Ultimatum') was one of four poems he had sent in the summer of 1940:

'I was astonished when someone signing himself J.R.A. wrote back saying that he would like to take one (it was the one I had put in to make the others seem better, but never mind).'

Here, as so often, the late J. R. Ackerley showed himself to be a perceptive judge; during his quarter of a century as literary editor of The Listener, that periodical probably published more good poetry than any other in England. As it has never been reprinted, it is worth noting this consummately Audenesque piece:

But we must build our walls, for what we are
Necessitates it, and we must construct
The ship to navigate behind them, there.
Hopeless to ignore, helpless instruct
For any term of time beyond the years
That warn us of the need for emigration:
Exploded the ancient saying: Life is yours.

For on our island is no railway station,
There are no tickets for the Vale of Peace,
No docks where trading ships and seagulls pass.
Remember stories you read when a boy
—The shipwrecked sailor gaining safety by
His knife, tree trunk, and lianas—for now
You must escape, or perish saying no.

Later appearances were in the Fortune Press's anthology, Poetry From Oxford in Wartime, edited by William Bell in 1944, and in his own first volume of poetry, The North Ship, published by the Fortune Press in July 1945. In the republished version of The North Ship, Larkin wrote a characteristically wry and humorous account of the book's original struggle for birth, assisted by that same L. S. Caton (the owner of the Fortune Press) who makes fleeting and protean appearances in several of Kingsley Amis's novels, for Amis's own first book of poems, Bright November, was published by the same press and no doubt with some of the same attendant difficulties. Later, in 1946, the Fortune Press published Larkin's first novel, Jill, a book which had a minor underground reputation at Oxford when I was an undergraduate in the early and mid-1950s: it was difficult to get copies at that time (though I think it has never actually been out of print), and those few there were were passed round and read with great respect and interest, not chiefly for the authentic-feeling atmosphere of 1940 Oxford but for the extraordinary way in which Larkin manages to present the central character's growing and gradually enveloping fantasy about 'Jill' with a clear narrative and realistic dialogue. This is not the place to deal properly with Jill, or with its more professional successor, A Girl in Winter, published by Faber in 1947; but they mark the brief flowering of Larkin the novelist, and both of them are so memorable that one can imagine him having staked out, if he had continued, an area and a reputation comparable with, say, Forster's up to Howards End.

The North Ship is now gently and self-deprecatingly dismissed by Larkin. Indeed, I want to make no great claims for it. It is interesting in the way that any considerable poet's juvenilia are interesting, with a phrase here, a line there, suggesting or prefiguring what was to come. Larkin has written:

Looking back, I find in the poems not one abandoned self but several—the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the only alternative to "old-fashioned" poetry; the undergraduate, whose work a friend affably characterized as "Dylan Thomas, but you've a sentimentality that's all your own"; and the immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls' school.

I find few traces of Auden; certainly nothing as Audenesque as 'Ultimatum,' though 'Conscript' has something of 'In Time of War' about it, particularly the first two stanzas:

The ego's county he inherited
From those who tended it like farmers; had
All knowledge that the study merited,
The requisite contempt of good and bad;
But one Spring day his land was violated;
A bunch of horsemen curtly asked his name,
Their leader in a different dialect stated
A war was on for which he was to blame …

I can find nothing at all of Dylan Thomas; perhaps the friend whom Larkin quotes was commenting on poems which did not in fact get selected for The North Ship. It is true that a good deal of Poetry Quarterly and Poetry London in that 1943-53 decade was taken up with Dylanism, and it might be thought surprising that Larkin escaped it; but as he has said:

'The principal poets of the day—Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Betjeman—were all speaking out loud and clear, and there was no reason to become entangled in the undergrowth … except by a failure of judgement.'

Admiration for Dylan Thomas didn't then, and doesn't now, necessarily carry in its wake base imitation.

But of Yeats there is a predominance in The North Ship:

'Not because I liked his personality or understood his ideas but out of infatuation with his music … In fairness to myself it must be admitted that it is a particularly potent music, pervasive as garlic, and has ruined many a better talent.'

Larkin has said that the edition of Yeats's collected poems he had at the time was the 1933 one, so that he 'never absorbed the harsher last poems.' This might be guessed from such lines as these:

Let the wheel spin out,
Till all created things
With shout and answering shout
Cast off rememberings;
Let it all come about
Till centuries of springs
And all their buried men
Stand on the earth again.
A drum taps: a wintry drum.

For the first time I'm content to see
What poor mortar and bricks
I have to build with, knowing that I can

Never in seventy years be more a man
Than now—a sack of meal upon two sticks.
The beauty dries my throat.
Now they express
All that's content to wear a worn-out coat,
All actions done in patient hopelessness,
All that ignores the silences of death,
Thinking no further than the hand can hold,
All that grows old,
Yet works on uselessly with shortened breath.

Yet though these poems are derivative, their technique is generally quietly assured; their infatuation is self-aware enough to stop short of mere pastiche. And here and there another voice comes through:

The cadences are mellifluous, but not in a middle-Yeatsian way; and the sense of time, its preciousness and its passing, is there. Four lines from 'Songs: 65° N.' directly point forward to 'Next, Please' in The Less Deceived, where they are put more sharply in focus:

I am awakened each dawn
Increasingly to fear
Sail-stiffening air,
The birdless sea.
(The North Ship)

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
(The Less Deceived)

In the 1966 re-publication of The North Ship, Larkin included an additional poem 'as a coda.' Rather, it is a prelude. In his preface to the Faber edition, he tells how in early 1946 he began to read Hardy's poems, having known him before only as a novelist: 'as regards his verse,' Larkin says:

I shared Lytton Strachey's verdict that "the gloom is not even relieved by a little elegance of diction." This opinion did not last long; if I were asked to date its disappearance, I should guess it was the morning I first read "Thoughts of Phena At News of Her Death."

Larkin's added poem ("XXXII" in the re-published The North Ship) first appeared in the little pamphlet, XX Poems, which Larkin brought out at his own expense in 1951. (There were 100 copies of this pamphlet, most of them—as ruefully described by Larkin—sent to well-known literary persons, the majority of whom failed even to acknowledge it, presumably because he had under-stamped the envelopes at a time when the postal charges had just been increased. It was still possible to order it in early 1954, as I did through Blackwells in Oxford, and to pay 4/6d for it. Its present dealers' value has been quoted at £20.) The first stanza of the new poem immediately establishes not just the new presence of Hardy (it is in fact much less like Hardy than the Yeatsian pieces are like Yeats) but a new way in Larkin of finding and using material. The observation is exact, the framing of mood and incident within description makes a perfect fit:

Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair,
I looked down at the empty hotel yard
Once meant for coaches. Cobblestones were wet,
But sent no light back to the loaded sky,
Sunk as it was with mist down to the roofs.
Drainpipes and fire-escape climbed up
Past rooms still burning their electric light:
I thought: Featureless morning, featureless night.

What Hardy taught Larkin was that a man's own life, its suddenly surfacing perceptions, its 'moments of vision,' its most seemingly casual epiphanies (in the Joycean sense), could fit whole and without compromise into poems. There did not need to be any large-scale system of belief, any such circumambient framework as Yeats constructed within which to fashion his work: Larkin has dismissed all that as the 'myth-kitty.' Like Parolles in All's Well, he seems to say: 'Simply the thing I am shall make me live.' As Larkin himself put it in a radio programme on Hardy:

When I came to Hardy it was with the sense of relief that I didn't have to try and jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my own life … One could simply relapse back into one's own life and write from it.

Looking again at 'Waiting for breakfast,' one sees that what it turns into is an address to the Muse, though in no sense that that habitual Muse-invoker, Robert Graves, would accept. The 'I' of the poem has spent the night with a girl, and his mood is one of almost surprised disbelief that he is so happy:

Yet whatever sparks the poet into writing poems doesn't seem to start from such a mood. 'Perfection of the life, or of the work': one is pushed back to Yeats again, to the sort of conundrum he poses there. Will absorption in the girl and in the happiness she seems to bring stifle his poems?

This is the first poem of Larkin's maturity, and it links interestingly with the earliest poem in The Less Deceived: 'Wedding-Wind,' which also dates from 1946. But there is one large difference. The voice of the poem here is in no useful sense that of the poet: a woman on the morning after her wedding night is wonderingly turning over the fact of her happiness, with the force of the high wind 'bodying-forth' not only the irrelevance of such violent elements to the new delight she has found, but also the way in which the whole of creation seems somehow to be in union with her state:

Can it be borne, this bodying-forth by wind
Of joy my actions turn on, like a thread
Carrying beads? Shall I be let to sleep
Now this perpetual morning shares my bed?
Can even death dry up
These new delighted lakes, conclude
Our kneeling as cattle by all-generous waters?

'Wedding-Wind' is the only completely happy poem of Larkin's, the only one in which there is a total acceptance of joy. Perhaps that is why it is liked by some people who otherwise find him too bleak a poet for their taste. Yet it is happy, joyous, without being serene: it implies, in its three closing questions, the impermanence of the very happiness it celebrates, the possibility of its being blown and scattered, made restless as the horses have been and

All's ravelled under the sun by the wind's blowing.

The poem's three questions remind one of the three questions at the end of 'Waiting for breakfast,' suggesting that the balance of 'sheer joy' can as easily be tipped in the other direction.

This emotional wariness, which can too easily—and inaccurately—be labelled as pessimism, is at the roots of Larkin's sensibility. Its fine-drawn expression can be found in most of the poems in The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings. And it is at this point, when Larkin in 1946 wrote 'Waiting for breakfast' and 'Wedding-Wind,' that it seems unprofitable to go on examining his poems in a supposed chronological order of composition; for from now on the personality is an achieved and consistent one, each poem re-stating or adding another facet to what has gone before. Critics who tried to sniff out 'development' when The Whitsun Weddings followed nine years after The Less Deceived, or who showed disappointment when they found none, were wasting their time or were demonstrating that Larkin was at no time their man. The sixty-one poems in these two books, and the handful that have appeared in periodicals since, make a total unified impact. There have been rich years and lean years (Larkin's remark that he writes about four poems a year shouldn't be taken too literally in any statistical sense), but only quantitatively.

Yet though there has been no radical development in Larkin's poetry during these years, the number of tones and voices he has used has been a great deal more varied than some critics have given him credit for. The 'emotional wariness' can in some of the poems be better defined as an agnostic stoicism, close to the mood (though not to the origin of that mood) of Arnold's 'Dover Beach.' And what he is both agnostic and stoical about is time, the passing of time, and 'the only end of age': death. Indeed, if it had not been used perfectly properly for another literary achievement (and in any case Larkin might reject it as being too presumptuously resonant), 'The Music of Time' could serve as a title for all Larkin's post-1946 poetry.

There are poems in which time, and death as the yardstick of time, are seen in an abstract or generalized context: 'Ignorance,' 'Triple Time,' 'Next, Please,' 'Nothing to be Said,' 'Going,' 'Wants,' 'Age.' They are abstract or generalized in that they don't start from some posited situation, though their language and imagery are concrete enough: the street, sky and landscape of 'Triple Time,' the 'armada of promises' of 'Next, Please,' the quickly shuffled references ('Small-statured cross-faced tribes / And cobble-close families/In mill-towns on dark mornings') of 'Nothing to be Said.' All our hours, however we spend them,

This great blankness at the heart of things has to be endured—that is what I meant by stoicism. We bolster up our ignorance, and make ourselves able to bear our long diminution and decay, by being busy with the present and—when we are young—dreaming about the future:

An air lambent with adult enterprise.

So, too, we look at the past, and cling to and preserve those bits of it that belong to us, which we call our memories. It is no accident that of the jazz which Larkin regards with such enthusiasm, it is the blues that he writes about with most feeling (in his prose pieces, that is; for example, in his record reviews in the Daily Telegraph. Only one poem, 'For Sidney Bechet,' celebrates this 'natural noise of good'). For the blues are thick with the searchings and regrets of memory.

In an often-quoted statement made in 1955, Larkin said:

'I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art.'

More recently, commenting on The Whitsun Weddings in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, he wrote:

'Some years ago I came to the conclusion that to write a poem was to construct a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely by reproducing it in whoever read the poem.'

Though he went on to qualify this, the 'verbal pickling' (as he put it) is seen to be the process at work in many of his best and best-known poems: in his two most sustained efforts, 'Church Going' and 'The Whitsun Weddings,' and also in 'Mr Bleaney,' 'Reference Back,' 'I Remember, I Remember,' 'Dockery and Son,' and elsewhere. All of these start from some quite specifically recalled incident which becomes, through the course of the poem, 'an experience' in the sense intended by Larkin in that prose note. A casual dropping-in to a deserted church; a long train-journey on Whit Saturday; the taking of new lodgings; a visit home to one's widowed mother; another train-journey, which takes one through one's long-abandoned birthplace; a visit in middle age to one's old college at Oxford—these 'human shows' inhabit an area Hardy would have recognized, and each both preserves the experience and allows it to move out into other areas not predicted by the casually 'placing' opening lines. Indeed, in several of them the placing, the observation, is steadily sustained for a great part of the poem, as if the 'impulse to preserve' were determined to fix and set the moment with every aspect carefully delineated, every shade faithfully recorded. I remember Larkin writing to tell me, when I was about to produce the first broadcast reading (in fact the first public appearance) of 'The Whitsun Weddings,' that what I should aim to get from the actor was a level, even a plodding, descriptive note, until the mysterious last lines, when the poem should suddenly 'lift off the ground':

'Impossible, I know,' he said comfortingly; though I think that first reader (Gary Watson) made a very fair approximation to it.

If 'The Whitsun Weddings' is a poem of one carefully held note until the very end, 'Church Going' is more shifting in its stance and tone. Both poems are written in long, carefully-patterned rhyming stanzas (Larkin once said to me that he would like to write a poem with such elaborate stanzas that one could wander round in them as in the aisles and side-chapels of some great cathedral), but whereas each ten-line stanza of 'The Whitsun Weddings' seems caught on the pivot of the short four-syllable second line, pushing it forward on to the next smooth run, the nine-line stanza of 'Church Going' is steady throughout, the iambic pentameter having to hold together—as it successfully does—the three unequal sections: the first two stanzas, easy, colloquial, mockingly casual; then the four stanzas of reflection and half-serious questioning, becoming weightier and slower as they move towards the rhetorical solidity of the final stanza's first line:

A serious house on serious earth it is….

'Church Going' has become one of the type-poems of the century, at the very least 'the showpiece of the "New Movement",' as G. S. Fraser put it; much discussed in every sixth-form English class and literary extension-course, anthologized and duplicated, so that I sometimes feel it has become too thoroughly institutionalized and placed. Larkin has quoted Hardy's supposed remarks (on Tess) on the subject: 'If I'd known it was going to be so popular, I'd have tried to make it better,' and one senses a wry surprise in that, as one does in his comment that after it was initially published in the Spectator (after first being lost, and then held in proof, for about a year), he 'had a letter from one of the paper's subscribers enclosing a copy of the Gospel of St John':

In fact it has always been well liked. I think this is because it is about religion, and has a serious air that conceals the fact that its tone and argument are entirely secular.

Here Larkin is perfectly properly fending off the common misconception that it is a 'religious' poem. It is not so, in any dogmatic or sectarian sense. It dips not even the most gingerly of toes into metaphysics, makes not even the most tentative gestures towards 'belief ('But superstition, like belief, must die'). What it does do is to acknowledge the human hunger for order and ritual (such as go with 'marriage, and birth, / And death, and thoughts of these'), and to recognize the power of the past, of inherited tradition, made emblematic in this abandoned piece of ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

But 'Church Going' is not a perfect poem, though a fine one, and it is not Larkin's best. Donald Hall has maintained that it would be a better one if it were cut by a third, and without accepting that kind of drastic surgery (American editors have a reputation for being the 'heaviest' in the world, leaning on their authors in a way that has more to do with power than with support) it is fair to say that it has some amusing but distracting divagations—particularly in the middle section—of a sort which one doesn't find in the equally circumstantial but more unified 'Whitsun Weddings.' That Irish sixpence, for example—many readers don't know whether they are supposed to laugh here or not (many do in any case); but if the ruined church which started the poem off was in Ireland, as Larkin in a broadcast said it was, wouldn't it make a difference? Does he mean to demonstrate the sort of unthinking piety that agnostics hold to out of habit, or is he chalking up another mild self-revelatory bit of schoolboyish japing, as in the mouthing of 'Here endeth' from the lectern? (What Larkin intends of that performance comes out very clearly in his Marvell Press recording.) One doesn't know; and in a poem so specific this is a flaw.

To go on about the Irish sixpence at such length may well seem absurdly trivial, but the uncertainty it suggests is not unique in the poem. One has the feeling that Larkin knows more than he chooses to admit, with the pyx brought in so effortlessly and the rood-lofts sniggeringly made much of: naming them implies knowledge of what they are, and one doesn't need to be a 'ruin-bibber, randy for antique' to recognize such things. They are part of one's general store of unsorted knowledge, like knowing who A. W. Carr or Jimmy Yancey (or, indeed, Sidney Bechet) were. Here, without much relish, I am drawn into mildly deploring what might be called the Yah-Boo side of Larkin's work—a side not often apparent, which he shares sporadically with his admired (and admiring) fellow-undergraduate and old friend from St John's, Kingsley Amis. (Incidentally, XX Poems was dedicated to Amis, and Amis dedicated Lucky Jim to Larkin.) The 'filthy Mozart' type of jeer is never given the extended outing with Larkin that it is with Amis, and one has to be aware of personae and so forth, but the edgy and gratuitous coarseness of 'Get stewed. Books are a load of crap' and 'What does it mean? Sod all' have always made me wince a bit. This might show a feeble prudishness in me, but rather I feel that Larkin's poems can get by without such manly nudging.

It could be argued that these things are part of Larkin's apt contemporary tone; certainly he has such a tone, more usefully heard in 'Mr Bleaney,' 'Toads,' 'Toads Revisited,' 'Reasons for Attendance,' 'Poetry of Departures,' and most startlingly in 'Sunny Prestatyn.' In this last poem the calculated violence seems exactly and inevitably matched with the brutalizing of the language: those lunging monosyllables are dead right—and 'dead' is right too. Ά hunk of coast' is drawn into the stabbing words that follow—'slapped up,' 'snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed,' 'Huge tits and a fissured crotch,' 'scrawls,' 'tuberous cock and balls,' 'a knife / Or something to stab right through.' Like the faded photographs that must lie behind 'MCMXIV,' like the medieval figures in 'An Arundel Tomb' that 'Time has, transfigured into … untruth,' the blandishments of the girl on the poster have (with the help of human agency) been reduced to the wrecks of time. As in the lines of the body, in 'Skin,' she is the end-product

Of the continuous coarse
Sand-laden wind, time.

'Sunny Prestatyn' is the most extreme of Larkin's poems about diminution, decay, death. Elsewhere, he more often brings to them what—in a review of Betjeman's poems—he has called 'an almost moral tactfulness.' 'Faith Healing,' 'Ambulances,' 'Love Songs in Age,' 'At Grass,' 'An Arundel Tomb,' the more recent and uncollected 'Sad Steps'—all, with perhaps the exception of the last, stand at a reserved but certainly not unfeeling distance from their ostensible subjects. In the broadcast I have already quoted from, Larkin said:

'I sometimes think that the most successful poems are those in which subjects appear to float free from the preoccupations that chose them, and to exist in their own right, reassembled—one hopes—in the eternity of imagination.' And he went on to say, introducing 'Love Songs in Age':

'I can't for the life of me think why I should have wanted to write about Victorian drawing-room ballads: probably I must have heard one on the wireless, and thought how terrible it must be for an old lady to hear one of these songs she had learnt as a girl and reflect how different life had turned out to be.' 'How different life had turned out to be'—here time is shown as the gradual destroyer of illusions. Like the advertisement hoardings in 'Essential Beauty,' showing us serenely and purely 'how life should be,' the old sheet music summons up and sets blankly before us two things: that lambent air which the future promised, and that present which has hardened 'into all we've got / And how we got it.' ('Dockery and Son.') Christopher Ricks (who has written particularly well on Larkin) has pointed out how in 'Love Songs in Age' the three sentences of the poem gradually narrow down, from the expansive openness of the first, with its careful proliferation of detail and its almost mimetic lyricism ('Word after sprawling hyphenated word'), through the briefer concentration on 'that much-mentioned brilliance, love,' to the blank acknowledgement that love has indeed not solved or satisfied or 'set unchangeably in order':

That last sentence, so much less serpentine than the others, seems the last brief twist of the knife.

Ricks has also pointed out one of the hallmarks of Larkin's style: those negatives which define the limits and shades of the world, and which coldly confront our flimsy illusions. Un, in, im, dis—with such small modifiers Larkin determines the edges of things, which blur into

So we find unfakable, unspoilt, undiminished, unmolesting, unfingermarked, unhindered, unchangeably, set against unsatisfactory, unlucky, unworkable, unswept, uninformed, unanswerable, unrecommended, untruthful and untruth. Imprecisions, imperfect, incomplete and inexplicable jostle with disbelief, disproved, disused and dismantled. They seem to share something—in their modifying, their determination to record an exact shade of response rather than a wilder approximation—with another hallmark: those compounds which one begins to find as early as the poems in The North Ship. Laurel-surrounded, fresh-peeled, branch-arrested, Sunday-full, organ-frownedon, harsh-named, differently-dressed, luminously-peopled, solemn-sinister—there are over fifty others in The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings alone.

Compound-formations bring Hopkins to mind, though his are of course a good deal more strenuous and draw more attention to themselves than Larkin's. Yet Hopkins is, perhaps curiously, a poet Larkin much admires. Indeed, though he has been at some pains to admit how narrow his tastes in poetry are, Larkin's acknowledged enthusiasms show a wider range of appreciation than he seems to give himself credit for. Without at all being a regular pundit in the literary papers, he has written with warmth and depth about not only Hardy but also William Barnes, Christina Rossetti, Wilfred Owen, and among living poets, Auden (pre-1940), Betjeman and Stevie Smith. Not much of a common denominator there, and of them all it is only Hardy who seems to have left any trace on Larkin's own work, and that in no important verbal way. In fact Larkin is very much his own poet. His impressment into the Movement, in such anthologies as Enright's Poets of the 1950s and Conquest's New Lines, did no harm and may have done some good, in that it drew attention to his work in the way that any seemingly concerted action (cf. The Group) makes a bigger initial impact than a lone voice. But really he shares little with the 'neutral tone' of what have been called the Faceless Fifties: anonymity and impersonality are not at all characteristics of his work, and the voice that comes across is far more individual than those of such properly celebrated poets as Muir, Graves and R. S. Thomas, to pick three who have never (so far as I know) been accused of hunting with any pack or borrowing anyone's colouring.

The case against Larkin, as I have heard it, seems to boil down to 'provincialism' (Charles Tomlinson), 'genteel bellyaching' (Christopher Logue), and a less truculent but rather exasperated demur that any poet so negative can be so good (A. Alvarez). Well, he is provincial in the sense that he doesn't subscribe to the current cant that English poets can profitably learn direct lessons from what poetry is going on in Germany or France or Hungary or up the Black Mountain: poetry is, thank heaven, a long way from falling into an 'international style,' such as one finds in painting, sculpture, architecture and music, and such validly 'international' pieces as I have seen (e.g. in concrete poetry) are at best peripherally elegant and at worst boring and pointless. 'Genteel bellyaching' and 'negative' are really making the same objection, the first more memorably and amusingly than the second. There is a sense in which Larkin does define by negatives; I have made the point already. He is wary in front of experience, as who should not be: one doesn't put in the same set of scales Auschwitz and the realization that one is getting older, or the thermo-nuclear bomb and the sense that most love is illusory. Yet the fact that Larkin hasn't, in his poems, confronted head-on the death camps or the Bomb (or Vietnam, or Che Guevara) doesn't make him, by definition, minor. His themes—love, change, disenchantment, the mystery and inexplicableness of the past's survival and death's finality—are unshakably major. So too, I think, are the assurance of his cadences and the inevitable rightness of his language at their best. From what even Larkin acknowledges as the almost Symbolist rhetoric of

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!

to the simple but remorseless

They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so

is a broad span for any poet to command. And those haunting closing lines to many poems ('Church Going,' 'The Whitsun Weddings,' 'No Road,' 'Next, Please,' 'Faith Healing,' 'Ambulances,' 'Dockery and Son,' 'An Arundel Tomb,' 'Sad Steps'—the list becomes long, but not absurdly so): they have an authentic gravity, a memorable persistence. I think that Larkin's work will survive; and what may survive is his preservation of 'the true voice of feeling' of a man who was representative of the mid-20th century hardly at all, except in negatives—which is, when you come to think about it, one way in which to survive the mid-20th century.