ABSTRACT
The flurry of words written about Philip Larkin over the past year and a half, energized by the publication of his Selected Letters and Andrew Motion’s biography, have contained very little real analysis of the reasons for what both his attackers and defenders agree was his importance to post-war English literature and culture.1 Indeed, the furore was clearly fuelled by a belief in his continuing centrality, his status, in Tom Paulin’s words, as a ‘national monument’.2 It is this belief, I would suggest, which is perhaps the most interesting aspect about the affair and which this essay will investigate. Why Larkin?3 Why did so many reviewers nostalgically use Larkin or a Larkin poem as means to access a whole historical period, and why were they so saddened and rattled by the revelations of his racism, misogyny, and misanthropy, as if his views said something about them?4 Why did their words convey the over-whelming sense that a home (a home?) they once had was lost, was no longer to be enjoyed, admired, or celebrated, but rather had to be elegized as something irretrievably gone in a way that can only be called suitably Larkinesque?
