Briefly

"I learned to live with my despair,
And suddenly Philip Larkin's there...."
--Czeslaw Milosz

"...the strong impression remains that the poets, in general, “demote” Larkin on a number of grounds: provinciality, lack of ambition, a corpus both crabbed and cramped. Seamus Heaney’s misgivings are probably representative: Larkin is “daunted” by both life and death; he is “anti-poetic” in spirit; he “demoralises the affirmative impulse”... No: Larkin is not a poet’s poet. He is of course a people’s poet, which is what he would have wanted. But he is also, definingly, a novelist’s poet. It is the novelists who revere him..."
Martin Amis on Philip Larkin in The Larkin Puzzle, FT, here.