[Larkin] has not, apparently, coveted the praise that has been lavished on him—praise he neither fully merits nor, perhaps, relishes. And nor has he been prolific. His entire oeuvre to date, if we take into account The North Ship, consists in collected form of 117 poems, thirty-two of which he has republished on sufferance. (p. 331)

Frequently he presents himself in the poems as an outsider, a man without a past to be nostalgic for and without much faith in the future, a man on the fringe of the academy and literary life, an isolated bachelor, a provincial, rejecting all that is not English, refusing to travel beyond the British Isles. Denial and self-deprecation are recurrent themes. However, this stance must be increasingly difficult to sustain in view of the fact that he is, willy nilly, the darling of the London literary establishment, has been crowned by journalists and...