Philip Larkin’s Inner World

Abstract

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 none the less identified, not long since, as wholly in keeping with the drab, diminished, unillusioned spirit of post-war Britain, a poetry of low-keyed vernacular honesty, whose every line seemed to be saying: ‘Come off it’.