Philip Larkin died in 1985, at the age of sixty-three. Even before his death he had come to be regarded in Britain as a kind of national institution, rather than as just another distinguished writer. His poems were the most widely quoted and anthologized of any Englishman whose career fell within the second half of the twentieth century; he had (grumblingly) received innumerable awards, prizes, medals, and honorary doctorates; he had been made the subject of various television and radio programs and collections of laudatory essays, twice been decorated by the Queen, elected to a Visiting Fellowship of All Souls’ College and an Honorary Fellowship of St. John’s College, both in Oxford, and, finally, offered the post of Poet Laureate by Margaret Thatcher during her period as prime minister. (He declined the offer on the grounds that he had by then already dried up as a poet.) Despite his well-advertised insularity of outlook and distaste for “abroad,” he had also gone to Hamburg to receive that city’s Shakespeare Prize for his contribution to English literature. (He once said that he wouldn’t mind going to China provided he come home on the same day.) The memorial service after his death was held in Westminster Abbey: an acknowledgment of services rendered which is granted only to the country’s most prominent public figures.

After all that, the early unveiling of a plaque to his memory in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey—or even perhaps a move to have him buried there, along with