This be the verse

Spending pleasurable hours looking for books is not like drilling for oil. Recently, however, while browsing in the excellent Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road, the black stuff spewed out like a geyser. A hardback collection of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings was on offer for £40. It wasn’t a first edition from 1964, which would have put another nought on the price. The book belonged to the fourth impression, published four years later, but it came with an inscription from another famous writer, who had presented it to an actress friend.

‘I hope you like these poems,’ he had written. ‘They are what I wanted the play to be — very English and full of affection and dissatisfaction. All my love. A.’ The ‘A’ was Alan Bennett, the actress Nora Nicholson, and the play, Bennett’s first for the stage, Forty Years On. Viewed from this distance, those words may be interpreted as a tribute from a superb writer, who was establishing an identity that is now much loved, to a great one. The Whitsun Weddings is not only Larkin’s finest collection of poems; it may also be the finest collection published in English in the second half of the last century.

Leonard Bernstein, the polymathic American musician and educator, who could recite the collection’s title poem from memory, went further. He considered Larkin to be the greatest poet of the 20th century, bar none, which might be overdoing things. Larkin, an early admirer of Yeats and Auden, eventually acknowledged Hardy as his supreme influence, and it isn’t difficult to see him as Hardy’s long-term successor. Both writers were provincial, in the best sense (and, in Larkin’s case, the worst), and found qualities of unforced lyricism in subjects that were often melancholy. Only England could have produced them.