The Whitsun Weddings
The collection that confirmed Larkin as the central English poet of the postwar era, and perhaps the most read English poet of the 20th century after Eliot. His subjects are time, disappointment, England's gradual fade, sex's awkwardness, death's absolute certainty, all rendered in stanzas of such formal perfection that the bleakness becomes oddly consoling. "An Arundel Tomb" ends: "What will survive of us is love." Even Larkin couldn't help believing it.
Larkin's range is a bedsit window. Disappointment, more disappointment, an excursion by train, then death. The formal perfection is real, but the misanthropy ('Mr Bleaney,' the 'cut-price crowd' of 'Here') shades into self-pity dressed as candor, and what the published letters later revealed about the man makes the curmudgeon act harder to enjoy.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
