[Aaron Poochigian]

I just received “The Complete Larkin” in the mail and have been busy extracting pleasure and lessons from it. The pleasure is private but here is a lesson: 70 pages of published poetry, 235 pages of unpublished poetry. He deemed less than a quarter of the verse he wrote worthy of refinement and eventual publication. The lesson is clear.

There have been a few gems among the unpublished stuff and lots of delightful doggerel but Larkin was right to publish only what he did. From what I gather, he was hesitant to include his first book “The North Ship” in his legacy. If he hadn’t, there would have been less than fifty pages that came down to us as official Larkin.