‘He is the only sophisticated poet today who requires no sophisticated response from the reader,’ John Bayley wrote in 1983. Twenty-three years later and long after Larkin’s death, Bayley’s insight remains true. Larkin once observed that he’d found a way of ‘making novels into poems’. Intriguingly, it was a novelist turned poet, Thomas Hardy, who killed Larkin’s early obsession with the music of Yeats – ‘as pervasive as garlic’ in Larkin’s later description. As in many novels resolution is sudden. The rejection in ‘Poetry of Departures’ to the elemental dream of leaving comes just as the heart quickens with the exhilaration of ‘He chucked up everything/And just cleared off’ to ‘swagger the nut-strewn roads’, or ‘Crouch in the fo’c’sle/Stubbly with goodness,’. Then, suddenly, the race is over before it has started. In ‘I Remember, I Remember’ Larkin reminds us that we all start from home, the memory of which never leaves us. The train stops at Coventry, the station sign becoming the Proustian ‘madeleine’ that inspires memories of ‘where my childhood was unspent’, of ‘The bracken where I never trembling sat . . . where she/Lay back, and ‘all became a burning mist’. The witty truth of most childhoods tumbles down to one of the great last lines in poetry: ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’ Proust, subverted. It’s hard to get away from nothing. Larkin once described the difficulty in escaping from home as akin to ‘writing Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.’ In ‘This Be The Verse’ there is gender equality in the parental blame game. Nature and nurture fail. Perhaps Beckett is right, ‘Never to have been born is best.’ After all, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Larkin, in a letter to Kingsley Amis, said of the poem, ‘Clearly my Lake Isle of Innisfree. I fully expect to hear it recited by a 1000 Girl Guides before I die.’ What an excellent idea! Also for boy scouts. Parental guilt removed at a stroke. The last lines are an exercise in exuberant nihilism: ‘Get out as early as you can/And don’t have any kids yourself.’ ‘Vers de Société’ is Larkin’s version of Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people’. He once said, ‘I see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than an affair of company diversified by solitude.’ The reason is deeper than unsociability. Parties to Larkin are the waste of precious time that would be better ‘repaid/Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind/And looking out to see the moon thinned/To an air-sharpened blade.’ ‘Mr Bleaney’ is a dialogue with a ghost. What do we leave behind us in the rooms we have vacated? Or in the life we have vacated ‘which measures our own nature’? Was Mr Bleaney satisfied ‘at his age having no more to show/Than one hired box’? Perhaps ‘He warranted no better, I don’t know’. Who knows? ‘Church Going’ explores reverence without religion, in an empty church actually in Ireland. The ‘unignorable silence’ into which the accumulated ceremonies of life and death echo in ‘A serious house on serious earth’ which is ‘proper to grow wise in,/If only that so many dead lie round’. Definitely Ireland. ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is a Fellini-like vision on station platforms of ‘grinning and pomaded, girls/In parodies of fashion, heels and veils/ . . . The fathers with broad belts under their suits/ . . . mothers loud and fat’ as ‘A dozen marriages got under way/ . . . with all the power/That being changed can give.’ The Dickensian title of ‘Dockery and Son’ is apt. It’s my favourite Larkin poem, a novel of a poem. Larkin always wanted to be a novelist and believed that ‘poetry chose me’, luckily for us. The poem is about youth and what one does with it. Dockery is remembered by the wifeless, childless, middle-aged narrator as a boy who seized his moment sexually and begot a son, who now attends their old college. Then, provocatively, Larkin throws down the philosophical gauntlet: ‘Why did he [Dockery] think adding meant increase?/ . . .Where do these/Innate assumptions come from?’ One of the great questions. One of the great poems.