Never having felt quite comfortable with the various notions of poetry derived from others, [in the late 1940s Larkin] realized that he could depend on his own feelings for the appropriate manner in which to present such material. He learned from Thomas Hardy that his own life, with its often casual discoveries, could become poems, and that he could legitimately share such experience with his readers. From this lesson has come his belief that a poem is better based on something from "unsorted" experience than on another poem or other art.

The technical key to such poetry is, of course, clarity, while its bane is obscurity. (p. 27)

Larkin's views on art and literature match very closely the general attitudes attributed to a group of writers with which he has been associated, known as The Movement. While critics have debated whether Larkin's poetry is, in fact, "Movement" poetry, and...