Avoiding the washing sherry …

… Dread of literary parties led Philip Larkin to shun Oxford poetry professorship | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The poet tells Trickett he is entirely “unfitted” for the role. “I have never considered literature in the abstract since that blessed day in 1943 when I laid down my pen in the Sheldonian Theatre and sauntered out into the sunshine, a free man; anything I have written since then has either been hack journalism or cries wrung from me by what I believe Gide calls the frightful contact with hideous reality,” writes one of the 20th century’s most beloved poets.