SOURCE: "The Poetry of Philip Larkin," in The Survival of Poetry: A Contemporary Survey, Faber and Faber, 1970, pp. 37-55.

In the following essay, Thwaite weaves Larkin's own commentary on his work into a chronological overview of his corpus.

There is a certain irony about sitting down to write a critical paper on the poetry of Philip Larkin, when one remembers some remarks of Larkin's about 'poetry as syllabus' and 'the dutiful mob that signs on every September.' Larkin needs no prolegomena, no exegesis: there is no necessary bibliography, no suggested reading, except the poems themselves. In a straightforward Words-worthian sense, he is a man speaking to men (though his detractors might put it that he is too often simply a chap chatting to chaps). Although few of the poems need any background knowledge beyond that which any reader of English may be supposed to command, when such...