The Librarian of Hull gives you recognizably the same product in his latest book [High Windows] as he did in his first, The North Ship, twenty years earlier. If you like that kind of thing, that's the kind of thing you like. I love it. Spare, evocative, heroically lucid, disabused, savage, understated, funny, brutal, subtle, the antithesis of Roethke's Open Houses and Rich's engagements, these are the supreme ordinary language poems, poems of desperate clarity and restraint and besieged common sense. And what they mostly say is, be beginning to despair, despair, despair. If Roethke is the poet of roots and shoots and sheath-wet beginnings, Larkin's the expert on ending up. (p. 398)

Twenty-four poems in ten years: that's a little better than one every six months. But as Virginia Woolf said of Milton, it's what's not written that counts too, it's the depth at which the options were taken, the commitments made, the decisions not to publish. What we do get in High Windows is much in little. These compressed, elegant, laconic poems are a little like the windfall apples Anderson described in Winesburg. Raunchy looking, they contain secret pockets of sweetness that do you more good than the shiny waxed stuff in the supermarkets. (p. 399)

Larkin is tough, even brutal, but also he's subtle and tender. Very much the poet of limitations, of wry, coerced common sense, he nonetheless turns on you frequently to reveal mystery, possibility, infinity. As John Bayley observes, "sun-comprehending glass" is as eloquent, as evocative as Yeats' "rook-delighting heaven," while "The Card-Players" starts as a genre piece—not that this is negligible in itself—but turns unexpectedly at the end from its Flemish interior to a choral comment that puts everything preceding it in a new context…. (p. 400)

When I think of England and English poets, it strikes me that the movement from Yeats to Auden to Larkin is rooted in realpolitik. Progressively more guarded, less willing to risk the grand style or to pronounce roundly on one's soul or others', the poets' very language recapitulates in little the whole anticolonial history of the country…. The energy of [Larkin's] language, the depth at which the decisions were made, the terror and despair and night fears checked by an intelligence that's consecutive and lucid up to the distant point at which being consecutive and lucid is irrelevant: these are virtues that dignify, even transform, the ostensible subjects. Art always affirms. (p. 402)