Ted Hughes vs Philip Larkin – whose team are you on?

Are you a Phillist or a Teddist? A Phillist is not a Philistine in a hurry, but one who warms to the sensibility of Philip Larkin. A Teddist prefers that of Ted Hughes. Recent BBC documentaries on each poet have clarified the choice. Whose vision of life is more convincing and compelling – the glum librarian or the dashing naturalist who made the ladies swoon (in and out of ovens)?

To define their difference it’s tempting to call Hughes a Romantic, and Larkin an anti-Romantic. But it doesn’t quite work. Hughes’s fascinated reverence for the natural world has some Romantic features, but his vision of nature’s brutality is hardly ‘Daffodils’. He also looked and behaved like a Romantic hero (Melvyn Bragg compared him to Heathcliff), but that’s not really the point. The word’s not much use – probably no major poet can be termed Romantic, after early Yeats. And in fact there’s arguably more Romanticism in Larkin.