Dutiful son …

… A famous misanthrope shows his heartwarming side - Daphne Merkin - Bookforum Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Was Eva really his “muse,” as James Booth suggests in his introduction, grounding him in the material of the mundane and the ordinary, the better that he might transform and set wing to it? “She is a muse,” Booth argues, “in the time-honored sense of being beyond the poet’s reach. Poetry is made of her, but she herself is unconscious of it.” This is certainly worth considering, especially given the fact that Larkin finished “Aubade,” his great poem about the pitiless, ungraspable inevitability of our own mortality—“Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true”—just days after Eva died on November 17, 1977, and wrote very little after it.