Volume 32, Number 21 & 22 · January 16, 1986
On Philip Larkin
By John Bayley
Philip Larkin's death at the age of sixty-three not only means a sad day for English poetry but echoes the deaths of poets in a more romantic era—Shelley drowned, Keats dying of consumption. Larkin was not a young poet cut short in the fullness of his creative life—far from it—and yet something of their legend hangs about him. Like Housman he was a Romantic born out of his age; and it is ironic that his poetry was nonetheless identified, not long since, as wholly in keeping with the drab, diminished, unillusioned spirit of postwar Britain, a poetry of low-keyed vernacular honesty, whose every line seemed to be saying: 'Come off it.'
Feature, 1387 words
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