Getting to know him …

… A life more ordinary: inside Philip Larkin’s extraordinary everyday | Prospect Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

…  Larkin’s private life was a sideshow; that his poetry, along with its attendant literary activities, was his real life; and that anyone who couldn’t grasp that fundamental fact shouldn’t be talking about him at all, lest they leave his true heritage at the mercy of tin-eared misrepresentation.