IN 1961, LARKIN suffered a sudden collapse, blackout, and brief hospitalization, for which no certain physical cause could be found.

What came as new, with the force of a revelation, was the steady, inexorable growth of poetic skill and creative depth, to the very end. The day didn't get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by 'Flannery O'Connor' in the bath – horribly depressing American South things. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. He is a bald vulture sitting on a crag; a plant in a pot that nobody waters; an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles.Anyway, "taking care of business" (to paraphrase Aretha Franklin) was definitely not this man's game. Larkin and Jones had a cult of the fluffy rodent, in a running joke that acquired its own seriousness.

It is impossible that so meticulous and self-conscious a craftsman should have missed this highly misleading ambiguity. Monica is a professor of English at another college and they have a long distance relationship for decades.

As unsatisfactory it was for both of them, they stayed together, vacationed together, and, at the end lived together.

Philip Larkin was a committophobe's committophobe, king of the ditherers, and his inadequacy was the only thing he was sure of. He published four volumes of poetry – The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) – for which he received innumerable honours including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the WH Smith Award.

When Larkin's mother moved into a nursing home in 1972 he was able to see Monica more often, both women being based in Leicester. Much of the time, though, readers will be thinking that the "literary correspondence" is something we're well shot of – a postwar embarrassment, like child labour, meat rationing and outdoor toilets. Ovid’s dictum— Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor, “I see the better and approve it, but follow the worse”—might have been written with Larkin as its prize example.

The truth is that sexual intercourse began for him as early as the spring of 1945, when he was in charge of the public library at Wellington, a small town in Housman’s Shropshire.Why he does not I do not quite understand, all I can think is that he was more serious about his writing than he lets on. Over time there is modest experimentation, and an attempt to synthesise Larkin's courtly and kinky sides.