The intense Englishness of Philip Larkin

The English language has a curious feature, called the phrasal verb. It consists of a plain verb plus a preposition; to go up, to get over, to find out. They are quite often more vivid than their simple synonyms – to ascend, to recover, to discover. New ones are constantly being thought up; they are also totally irrational – get on with or get off with? Most serious writers spend a lot of time thinking about them.

One day, the story goes, the poet Philip Larkin was challenged by his secretary at work. She had discovered a cache of pornography in his office cupboard. ‘But what’s it for?’ she asked. Larkin considered. ‘To wank’ – he paused – ‘to wank to, or with, or at.’

It’s the centenary of Philip Larkin’s birth. This is often the moment when a poet of large reputation is decisively discarded – you have to think of what the 1790s started to think of Pope, born in 1688, or the Bloomsbury group of Tennyson, born in 1809.