… Larkin in America | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
… why should Americans read Larkin? An instrumental answer might be that he used our common language so beautifully. The English-speaking world is a kind of community, after all. Larkin sought to rescue English poetry from the habit of expressing, through convention, things unfelt and half-meant. He wanted to tether poetic language to everyday speech. He was a tremendously deliberate writer, for whom a poem’s gestation might take a decade; his patterning was complex but made to seem simple.
"Larkin’s modest gift to us was that, by lashing himself to the mast of despair and writing out of his own private terror, he made the world a marginally less lonely place."
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