The poet and a city …

… 'What a hole': Hull has embraced Philip Larkin – but did the love go both ways? | Cities | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… according to Chesters, Hull soon began to “work on Larkin”. The poet liked that it was unpretentious, with less “crap around” than London. He was free to produce some of his best work: the Whitsun Weddings, the Large Cool Store, Toads and, above all, Here, Larkin’s sweeping evocation of a city and its hinterland. With its “surprise of a large town”, its “spires and cranes” and “ships up streets”, Here shows how intimately Larkin had come to know his adopted home by 1961 – and how far he’d come from his early dismissal of it.

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