Self-Positioning

Stefan Collini

  • BuyThe Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries edited by Zachary Leader
    Oxford, 336 pp, £18.99, May 2009, ISBN 978 0 19 955825 4

Craig Raine recalls that when the former chairman of Faber, Charles Monteith, encountered the suggestion that one of Philip Larkin’s poems was indebted to Théophile Gautier, he was ‘incredulous’. To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was ‘ludicrous’. ‘He had fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s bluff, insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature.’

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