I WAS once taken to task by a sales rep shocked that Queen’s University had done nothing to mark the fact that Philip Larkin, one of the most consequential English poets of the 20th century, had once been there as a librarian.

It was the late nineties and I had just started working there.

I cannot remember what he was selling, but he made a great job of selling Larkin, whose poetry meant much to him.

Larkin was not the most humorous of men, so don’t go looking for laughs in his verse, but he had a great turn of phrase. There’s a famous opening line about parenting in his poem ‘This Be The Verse’ which is still unfit for publication in a family newspaper.

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Less contentious is his observation that “Sexual intercourse began in 1963 / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / and the Beatles first LP”. Even a lugubrious poet needs to have his finger on the pulse of popular culture.

For me one of his most moving poems is his meditation on two effigies, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, and its closing observation that “What will survive of us is love”.

Larkin may not have identified himself as a ‘Queen’s poet’, but he was included in........

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