SOURCE: "Four Conversations," in The London Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 6, November, 1964, pp. 71-77.

In the following interview, Larkin discusses his attitudes towards modernist poetry, as exemplified in a number of his own poems.

[HAMILTON]: I would like to ask you about your attitude to the so-called 'modernist revolution' in English poetry; how important has it been to you as a poet?

[LARKIN]: Well, granted that one doesn't spend any time at all thinking about oneself in these terms, I would say that I have been most influenced by the poetry that I've enjoyed—and this poetry has not been Eliot or Pound or anybody who is normally regarded as 'modern'—which is a sort of technique word, isn't it? The poetry I've enjoyed has been the kind of poetry you'd associate with me, Hardy pre-eminently, Wilfred Owen, Auden, Christina Rossetti, Williams Barnes; on the whole, people to whom...