“I want to see them starving, 

The so-called working class,

Their wages weekly having,

Their women stewing grass”

(Philip Larkin, letter to Robert Conquest – 26th of May, 1976)

This is one of the less tender sentiments expressed in the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, a poet lauded by The Times as the greatest post-war British writer. They are not, however, the worst sentiments within the letters. After these were published in 1992, many added up the racism, misogyny and classism contained within and concluded that his poetry was irreparably tarnished: Terry Eagleton declared that the letters “unmask him as a sniggering devotee of porn and practicing a brand of sexual crudity with his male cronies which would put a schoolboy to shame.”

Against these charges, Larkin’s followers usually take one of two approaches. Either they reply to each of Larkin’s outrages with an example of the beauty his poetry could produce – as though the subtraction of bigotry from eloquence still left Larkin in surplus – or insist on a firm separation between art and artist.

“To condemn his corpus on the grounds of his unsavoury views would be to strike a bloody cleaver through the ranks of the intellectuals of the past”

The naïveté of the latter approach is clear. Dividing Larkin the man and Larkin the poet is not so easy. Inevitably, his prejudices seep into the respectable canon, not obviously but in faint shades easily missed on the first reading. Looking back a second time one notices that, in Going, Going, England is defined slyly as a land of “The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, / The guildhalls, the carved choirs” as though he were quoting straight from the wearied Little Englander pages of The Telegraph. Equally, Larkin’s classism straggles into his work like a fugitive under a cloak; Toads Revisited betrays his contempt for the unemployed: “All dodging the toad work / By being stupid or weak.”

But this does not mean we should stop reading Larkin. To condemn his corpus on the grounds of his unsavoury views would be to strike a bloody cleaver through the ranks of the intellectuals of the past: while you’re at it, you may as well throw Pound into the pit, Kipling into the dust and Waugh out of the window. The heart instinctively, and rightly, revolts against this principle by which the faults of artists and intellectuals must damn their every word to execration – a principle which would hardly leave us much to study, or not much to do with what we study besides express our smug pride at our superiority over the prejudices of the past.

“To denounce the poetry because of the reprehensible opinions of its progenitor is almost as small-minded as bigotry itself”

Even within Larkin’s work, the prejudices do not overwhelm the poetry. The diremption of the writer and writings is misguided, but not entirely wrong. When Larkin sat down to write, he did not pull out his pen and in a moment become Larkin the poet; the same bundle of jealousies festered inside him. Perhaps when he began writing Toads Revisited it was with his contempt for the jobless ready to surge up like a bout of acid reflux, or in Going, Going it was with a view to a merry old England lost in the welters of modernity.

Nevertheless, what came out of his writing was not a reflection of his opinions but a refraction. Anything Larkin published went through a tortuous sequence of drafts and redrafts, poems abandoned and resumed. So what emerges is something quite different from the first impulse, but not foreign to it. Not a confessionalist, the tendency in Larkin’s best work is to draw out the universal: though one of its frames is the lazy condemnation of the unemployed, what undergirds Toads Revisited is not this but the fear of idleness and the desire for work to distract from life:

“Give me my in-tray, / My loaf-haired secretary… Give me your arm, old toad; / Help me down Cemetery Road.” Likewise, for all the narrow-mindedness of Going, Going, it also seethes with anger at the careless waste of the Earth and the gobbling drive of consumerism.

The act of writing does not conjure up some new personality: the poet as a blessed creature elevated above the person’s lowly thoughts. But writing does bend the poem from its original conception and can bring forth timeless ideas even from prejudiced minds. Yet it doesn't prevent that original idea from retaining its imprint on the text. So, we ought to read Larkin, but with our eyes open and our minds clear: to denounce the poetry because of the reprehensible opinions of its progenitor is almost as small-minded as bigotry itself, but to assume that we can ignore the person behind the work is nothing more than idle dreaming. This goes not only for Larkin but all the controversial personages we meet in the course of our studies: bigots can write great works, but that does not mean these works show no trace of their origins.