I'm not in the habit of reading The Spectator, but Twitter drew my attention to this article by Nicola Shulman, which certainly throws some interesting new light on the poetry of old Laughing Boy himself, Philip Larkin.

I'm a bit of an agnostic where Larkin's concerned. I did The Whitsun Weddings as part of A Level English Literature (I can only imagine what we'd have made of this piece of lit criticism at the time), and didn't enjoy it much, then warmed to it a little later on. I suppose, as with the vast majority of poets, there are poems of his that I like, and others that I don't like, and others again that I really don't have a strong opinion of.