Volume 36, Number 9 · June 1, 1989
The Master of the Ordinary
By Derek Walcott
Philip Larkin: Collected Poems
edited with an introduction by Anthony Thwaite
Farrar, Straus and Giroux/ The Marvell Press, 330 pp., $22.50
The average face, the average voice, the average life—that is, the life most of us lead, apart from film stars and dictators—had never been defined so precisely in English poetry until Philip Larkin. He invented a muse: her name was Mediocrity. She was the muse of the diurnal, of habit, of repetition. She lived in life itself, not as a figure beyond it, a phantom of yearning, but as the plain, transparent companion of a confirmed benedict.
Review, 5283 words
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