ABSTRACT
Two thick books relating to Philip Larkin that weigh five and a half pounds, together with a rash of reviews, serve to reminds that Larkin was probably the last in a line of English poets extending back to Chaucer who are read extensively in the United States. Those thick books may also remind that, at a time within living memory, English and American poetry at large was of a piece, even though not cut from the same cloth. Larkin's shots at literary America are scattered but frequent and venomous, as when he writes to Robert Conquest: "Boredom hangs around like a crappy friend, or a literary American one's forced to be nice to". Larkin's notion of American blacks salted his tastes in fiction and his prejudice against blacks in England. The most sympathetic and interesting parts of the letters indicate Larkin's literary tastes, which underlay the poetry and his various pronouncements about poetry itself.
