![]() "Mr Nice tackles Mr Nasty" read the headline above an interview with Motion in The Independent. Following the publication of Anthony Thwaite's Selected Letters in 1992 and Andrew Motion's official biography, A Writer's Life, in 1993, Larkin fell spectacularly from grace. He wrote to Fay Godwin that he had given Faber "vehement instructions" not to use one group of her photographs, determined that "the Boston Strangler" will not reappear.' Such an image nevertheless features on the jacket of the current Selected Poems, its bleak glare lending support to Martin Amis's contention in his introduction that Larkin had "no emotions, no vital essences, worth looking back on", but "siphoned all his energy, and all his love, out of the life and into the work".įor though Larkin is one of our best-loved poets, he is also the man we love to hate. Larkin was aware of the capacity of his physical appearance to generate negative responses, and attempted to control his public visual image. And soon nothing more terrible, nothing more true." ![]()
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