SOURCE: "Philip Larkin," in Eight Contemporary Poets, Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 69-94.

In the essay below, Bedient praises Larkin's poetic voice, claiming "[his achievement has been the creation of imaginative bareness, a penetrating confession of poverty."]

English poetry has never been so persistently out in the cold as it is with Philip Larkin—a poet who (contrary to Wordsworth's view of the calling) rejoices not more but less than other men in the spirit of life that is in him. Frost is a perennial boy, Hardy a fighter, by comparison. The load of snow, soiled and old, stays on the roof in poem after poem and, rubbing a clear space at the window, Larkin is there to mourn once again a world without generative fire. Well, it is just as he knew it would be, though now and then something surprising—a sheen of sunlight, some flutter of...