Celebrating Larkin …

… A True Poet by Christopher Ricks | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In Larkin’s poems a person speaks in his own voice, “the true voice of feeling,” without subterfuge and yet also without hot intrusiveness. The best of his poems have all the warm immediacy of a letter or a conversation, but they inflict on us none of the unease which we feel with some confessional poetry, the feeling that we are snooping or eavesdropping with the author’s connivance.