Article: Getting to know Philip Larkin: the life and letters.

The publication in England of these two hefty volumes - Motion's Life and Larkin's Letters - roused a critical storm whose rumblings continue to this moment. Critics took turns in savaging Larkin for the sexist, racist, xenophobic, and - to round things off - hypochondriac mutterings that recur in the letters and that Motion also points to in the biography.

One would have thought by this time the audience for poetry would have become inured to the blemished views of major writers. T.S. Eliot's leering anti-Semitism did little to impede the progress of his reputation and influence. Nor did Yeats's fascist blatherings block his standing as a poet. The response to ...

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