[Larkin] has not, apparently, coveted the praise that has been lavished on him—praise he neither fully merits nor, perhaps, relishes. And nor has he been prolific. His entire oeuvre to date, if we take into account The North Ship, consists in collected form of 117 poems, thirty-two of which he has republished on sufferance. (p. 331)

Frequently he presents himself in the poems as an outsider, a man without a past to be nostalgic for and without much faith in the future, a man on the fringe of the academy and literary life, an isolated bachelor, a provincial, rejecting all that is not English, refusing to travel beyond the British Isles. Denial and self-deprecation are recurrent themes. However, this stance must be increasingly difficult to sustain in view of the fact that he is, willy nilly, the darling of the London literary establishment, has been crowned by journalists and honoured by the Queen, and has edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). This has placed strains on the poet. He no longer speaks with confidence as outsider and provincial. He has been spirited inside. The best poems in his fourth book, High Windows (1974), abandon the old stance altogether. 'The Explosion', 'How Distant', and 'The Old Fools'—poems of observation—take their tone from the experience. If Larkin is to avoid self-parody in future (something he fails to do in several poems in High Windows) he will have either to assume impersonality de rigueur, or find himself a new stance.

In the poems, people are illuminated by the objects they collect about them—their possessions reveal their ambitions, self-deceptions, unfulfilments. The industrial and the pastoral landscapes tell us about the minds of the urban and rural communities that made or sustain them, just as the particular vase or the lack of bookshelves in a room describes the inhabitant. Objects thus lend a reality to the person, not the person to the objects. This inverted romanticism is one of Larkin's characteristic and compelling effects.

Though the poems are subtly made, they are self-contained—we can grasp the allusions without footnotes, without consulting any document beyond the daily paper. The poems are replete with the small tragedies, losses and frustrations which add up to the large gradual tragedy of lives in a thousand furnished rooms, in a particular country at a particular time. (pp. 332-33)

Though he learned only little from Hardy's technical practice, except perhaps his formal experimentation within traditional limits, he learned from him about time. Hardy juxtaposes the impoverished present and the unrealized past, where Larkin juxtaposes the impoverished present and the blighted future—and death. The blues are his music—indeed, he is a jazz critic.

His ostensible aesthetic motivation is 'to preserve things I have seen / thought / felt'. His poems are 'verbal devices' to reproduce in the reader the experience—'verbal pickling' as he calls it. The poems generally are cumulative—the scene is set, details assembled, until there is a point of lift-off, a modulation of tone or a deepening of seriousness. From the evocation of externals, the poet proceeds to release their composite meanings. When the 'lift-off' fails the poems are sometimes vivid verse catalogues only, as in 'To the Sea' and 'Show Saturday'.

Time does not destroy his illusions—it intensifies his disillusion. For him—in contrast to Hardy—things somehow could not have been different. We did not look away, or make a specific wrong choice in the past—for all choices are partly wrong. (p. 334)

His use of negatives is a central part of his technique. But usually, except in a few poems such as 'I Remember, I Remember', his negatives do not suggest what could have been. They simply draw a black circle around what is, the tight frontiers of being. His apparently negative words do not always carry a negative meaning, however: 'unfakeable', 'unpriceable' and 'unignorable' are obliquely positive. He tries to extend language by making hybrid words or hyphenated kennings. (pp. 334-35)

The themes in The North Ship—unwilling capitulation to the system of things, love's unsuccess, frustration, boredom, loneliness, and especially Time, 'the echo of an axe / Within a wood'—inform the later books. All that is lacking is the Larkin scenario to make the emotions or lack of emotions come alive memorably, through particulars. The early problem may have been that the 'I' was not a voice but a fabricated poetical persona, much as the 'I' in High Windows is sometimes an outdated 'I' who no longer sounds true.

The adjustment of style between The North Ship and his second book, The Less Deceived (1955), is complete. The first poem in the second collection, 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album', is Betjemanesque, though more sinewy than Betjeman, with an Edwardian archness. The poet's attraction to the young lady is strongly sexual. The images are not symbolic—they are evocative particulars. 'Next Please', in the same book, is perhaps Larkin's most haunting 'time' poem, formally varied. 'Wants' has something of the power of MacNeice, though it is more condensed in expression. (pp. 335-36)

Another change came in The Whitsun Weddings (1964). The perspective widens, the images derive from broader experience, and the vision becomes social. In a world heavy with late capitalism, a world of transactions and relationships which time renders senseless, the tragedy of ephemerality and unfulfilment moves out from the 'I'. (p. 336)

In High Windows there seem to be more Larkins at work than at any time since The North Ship. The Larkin of 'Here' reappears—without his earlier power—in 'To the Sea' and 'Show Saturday'. His attempt to celebrate certain social customs and rites is hampered by his native temperament. He knows the rites, too, have their date. The voice of Browning can be heard in 'Livings (iii)': perhaps Larkin will embark on dramatic monologues. There are, too, some notable successes in essentially new tones. 'High Windows' itself has, in all but the first stanza, assurance, candour, and an unresolved suggestiveness only seldom found in the earlier work. The same quality, but a different tone, informs 'The Explosion', about a pit disaster. 'The Old Fools' has a brutality and asperity which are tempered into tenderness. Age is treated with more sense of immediacy.

A disturbing aspect of High Windows is that six of the poems are cheap in some of their effects. The poet hankers to be one of the chaps, to speak their sort of language…. [The] fake bonhomie results in an entirely gratuitous vulgarity. Is Larkin trying to embody the process of degeneration he sees in society within the very language of the poem? His power in the past derived from an unwillingness to compromise form and voice with subject matter: they at least remained clear and powerful. Here language begins to ape experience, to unfortunate effect. (p. 337)

If The Whitsun Weddings opened into a wider social and topographical perspective, High Windows looks to the future of society and the polluted landscape. It is Larkin's most civic-minded display. There is fatalistic prophecy, even as he celebrates recurrences, however trivial. The loss or the wastage—of empire, landscape, values, rites, and so on—are a dominant concern in High Windows and may be further developed in its sequel. (p. 338)