To the Editors:
In his appreciation of Philip Larkin (“Trying to Preserve Something,” The New Criterion, February 1986), Robert Richman cites Seamus Heaney’s 1982 essay on Larkin for the proposition that Larkin’s poetic career reflects a struggle between Yeats’s visionary interests and Hardy’s more skeptical qualities. Just to fill out the record: Andrew Motion’s study of Larkin—noted by Mr. Richman in his January 1986 review of Motion’s Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-1984—makes a similar argument, tracing the tension between provincialism and symbolism, restraint and emotion, throughout Larkin’s work. Motion’s book was also published in 1982.

Although Heaney, according to Mr. Richman, believes that the phrases “O wolves of memory! Immensements!” from “Sad Steps” represent the “symbolic transports” associated with Yeats, the context...

 

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