ABSTRACT
In 1957, Larkin reacted, with typical hyperbole, to a trend that can be said to have continued in our academies over the subsequent half a century:
A cunning merger between poet, literary critic and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable): it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the poet has gained the happy position wherein he can praise his own poetry in the press and explain it in the class-room, and the reader has been bullied into giving up the consumer’s power to say ‘I don’t like this, bring me something different’.1
