Although he rejected the prevailing Neo-Romanticism of the late forties and earl y fifties, Philip Larkin was no admirer

of modernism. Like many in the English m iddle-class, for example, he thought Picasso a fake, and believed that an artist should make a horse look like a horse. When some disparaged his work as limited and commonplace, Larkin replied, Id like to k now what dragon-infested world these lads live in to make them so free with the word commonplace. His irritation stemmed from his view that poetry was an act of san ity, of seeing things as they are. He thought that the connection between poetry and the reading public, forged in the 19th century by such poets as Kipling, Hou sman and Brooke, had by the mid-20th century been destroyed by the growing unint elligibility of English poetry to the general reader. He attributed this in part to the emergence of English literature (along with the other arts) as an academ ic subject, demanding poetry that required elucidation. He saw no such need to explain his own work. When asked to expand on The Whitsun Weddings, he remarked that the intent of each poem was clear enough in itself, and he would only add that the poems had been written in or near Hull, Yorkshire, with a succession of 2B pencils during the years 1955 to 1963. Influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy, he made the mundane details of his life the basis for t ough, unsparing, memorable poems that rejected the Victorian belief in a benevol ent God, exploring life with a post-religious stoicism. The poems themselves are deceptively simple. Through the details of advertisements, train-stations, and provincial towns, they transform into something elevated and strangely beautiful the central issues of ordinary life in the language of ordinary speech. His und erlying themes of love, solitude, and mortality express intense personal emotion while they strictly avoid sentimentality or self-pity, using rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction with an extraordinary variety of meters and stanzaic for ms. These qualities were quickly identified, if not always appreciated, by revie wers. As the critic Donald Hall put it (only half-admiringly), [Larkins poem] At G rass is the best horse picture ever painted. Some critics went so far as to call him anti-social. In an interview, Larkin que stioned why he was described a melancholy man, protestingself-deprecatinglythat he was actually rather funny. Neither of these adjectives reflect the beauty of his poetry that is the source of a deep, abiding pleasure. Philip Larkin earned a living as a librarian until his death of cancer in 1985. His first poem was published in 1940, but he earned his reputation as one of Eng lands finest poets with the publication of The Less Deceived in 1955, which was s ubscribed to by almost all recognized young English poets: Amis, Bergonzi, Boyar s, Brownjohn, Conquest, Davie, Enright, Hamburger, Hill, Jennings, MacBeth, Murp hy, Thwaite, Tomlinson, and Wain. His status was confirmed with the release in 1 963 of The Whitsun Weddings (the title poem of which may be the finest in all hi s work), and again with High Windows in 1974. The mood of each of these thin vol umes changed considerably from poem to poem; but, for all their