In the essay below, Bedient praises Larkin's poetic voice, claiming "[his achievement has been the creation of imaginative bareness, a penetrating confession of poverty."]

Below, Kuby examines Larkin's place among British poets, specifically his relationship to the modernist school.

Here, Brown focuses on Larkin's "absences, " not solely as symbols from nature, but as referents for his audience.

In the following essay, Thwaite weaves Larkin's own commentary on his work into a chronological overview of his corpus.

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

Readers of Philip Larkin's poetry keep writing about it, even though they recognize how simple and clear it is, because they also sense that its most distinctive aspect is indefinable, not just in criticism of the poetry but in the poetry itself. Because this aspect of Larkin's poetry seems by its very nature to be inexpressible, it needs speaking of in as many ways as possible, if the very sense of it is not to lapse. It seems that only the obvious can be said of Larkin, and that everyone who...

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...

Never having felt quite comfortable with the various notions of poetry derived from others, [in the late 1940s Larkin] realized that he could depend on his own feelings for the appropriate manner in which to present such material. He learned from Thomas Hardy that his own life, with its often casual discoveries, could become poems, and that he could legitimately share such experience with his readers. From this lesson has come his belief that a poem is better based on something from "unsorted"...

Stylistically [the] thirty-two poems [in The North Ship (1945)] differ from Larkin's mature work in two ways: they are dominated by the influence of Yeats, and they lack "local texture", the air of having proceeded out of a particular experience: only eight of them have titles. Larkin frankly describes them as "a mixture of Yeats and having nothing much to write about". It is not proposed to comment here on the influence of Yeats, except to say that it is not so much a mat...

For the most part the poets of the 1950s, and particularly Philip Larkin, reject the traditions of their immediate past. Their poetry represents a revival of a tradition associated with Hardy and kept alive only through the vigour and persistence of poets like Robert Graves. Their distrust of political programmes or religious or philosophical ideas is profound; their hatred of the "old gang," whose faith in programmes and ideas led Europe into six years of slaughter, runs deep. In poetry they ...

In the following review of Collected Poems, Brookhiser examines the language and content of Larkin's poems, concluding that "his world looks severly limited."

The following review commends poet Anthony Thwaite for including much of Larkin's unpublished work in Collected Poems, thereby revealing the careful editing and revising Larkin performed, and the deliberation with which he practiced his craft.

[Larkin] has not, apparently, coveted the praise that has been lavished on him—praise he neither fully merits nor, perhaps, relishes. And nor has he been prolific. His entire oeuvre to date, if we take into account The North Ship, consists in collected form of 117 poems, thirty-two of which he has republished on sufferance. (p. 331) Frequently he presents himself in the poems as an outsider, a man without a past to be nostalgic for and without much faith in the future, a man on the fringe of the acad...

The unanswerable perfection of [Larkin's] best poems, the inevitable finish which leaves nothing to be said, are so apparent that one has heard such comments as, 'Yes, marvellous—but minor', as if perfection implied diminution. Such ladder-ratings get one nowhere. Who is the greater—Mozart or Beethoven? Innocence, the pathos and grim humour of experience, the poignancy of the past (whether one's own remembered past or the imagined past of another century), the chang...

The Librarian of Hull gives you recognizably the same product in his latest book [High Windows] as he did in his first, The North Ship, twenty years earlier. If you like that kind of thing, that's the kind of thing you like. I love it. Spare, evocative, heroically lucid, disabused, savage, understated, funny, brutal, subtle, the antithesis of Roethke's Open Houses and Rich's engagements, these are the supreme ordinary language poems, poems of desperate clarity and restraint and besieged...

[In his third collection, High Windows], as in The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings (one small and dazzling book every 10 years), [Larkin] writes with enormously concentrated, incandescent transparency about achingly intimate, precisely observed, familiar figures that fill him at once with parched despair and an affection so tainted with regret that it has all but been stifled…. Not for him the grand gestures of Robert Lowell and Dylan Thomas, the visionary ego of Yeats, the formal revolutions ...