FIRST THOUGHTS: Poet Phillip Larkin shown in a new light
The Hull-based poet-librarian had become a ‘National Treasure’, beloved by the English for his trenchant, accessible poems, including ‘This Be The Verse’, with its famous first line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, referred to here as a contender for “the funniest serious English poem of the 20th century’.
But the publication of Larkin’s letters in 1992, and his official biography by fellow poet Andrew Motion in 1993 revealed that the tall, bespectacled, bald man with a reputation for gloominess and reclusiveness not only had a complicated personal life, much of it spent in a love triangle with two women, but also had a taste for pornography, and apparently racist and fascist tendencies.
