The question of the two profiles in Larkin's poetry—the implacable skeptic and the visionary manqué—is best considered in connection with those poems which explore the meaning of death. There emerges gradually a distinction between a view of personal death, which is seen as inevitable and unmitigated, and a view of death in relation to a world which perpetually renews itself. In this latter view—and it is one increasingly exemplified in his latest work—a quiet trust is sometimes apparent, a trust in continuity, a belief in something "undiminished somewhere" …, which will survive beyond his individual "extinction". There is, in addition, a significant body of work which illustrates the proposition that "life is slow dying"…. This fundamental idea shapes much of Larkin's perspective on human experience, a perspective, above all, on the habitual deceptions and failures with which our lives are composed, on life which is...