How does Philip Larkin’s gloom retain such power to disturb? His bleakest verses have the quality of direct address, as if a poetical Eeyore were protesting directly into our ear. ‘Aubade’, his haunting night-time meditation on the terrors of death and dying, focuses on ‘the sure extinction that we travel to/ And shall be lost in always’ and offers no consolation.
Peter J. Conradi
The biography that makes Philip Larkin human again
A review of Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love, by James Booth. A far more attractive character emerges from this new biography than the miserable Mr Nasty found in Andrew Motion's
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