The title of Richard Palmer’s book comes from a passage in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

These lines are more ominous than Palmer’s book requires. He merely claims that Philip Larkin was not—or not entirely—the glum, racist, sexist, misogynist he often appears to have been: he is not justly thought of as the man who swapped pornographic magazines with Robert Conquest and racist obscenities with Kingsley Amis. Larkin wore such deliberate disguises, Palmer maintains, to protect himself. His true self did not coincide with his appearances at every point. Palmer wants to rescue Larkin from his most offensive performances as if they were merely tactical. In the noxious passages, he didn’t mean what he said, or he was mocking the people who enjoyed such sentiments.

Palmer’s book raises, without appearing to want to, a difficult question of interpretation. I would like to accept W. B. Yeats’s claim, in “A General Introduction for My Work,” that a poet “is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.” If that were true, we would be justified in ignoring the miserable bundle—the man’s