“Larkin’s poems taught me so much about my new home.” So tweeted the then secretary of state for education, Nadhim Zahawi, in June 2022. I found this amusing because migrants who fight tooth and nail to risk their lives to get to another country don’t usually expect the host country to say, as in “This be the Verse”, “Get out as early as you can/And don’t have any kids yourself”. In “Self’s the Man”, from the The Whitsun Weddings, Arnold “married a woman to stop her getting away/Now she’s there all day”; Arnold is mocked for getting married, for having children, for being a good father and for his DIY skills. Could these be the British values that Zahawi found so edifying?
I first came across Larkin when my middle-class peers quoted him in the Royal Holloway quadrant when I was an undergraduate, and when I started reading contemporary poetry, I saw his fingerprints on every British poet. I learned that to be accepted as a person of culture, the correct opinion was that I liked Larkin, perhaps even that I loved Larkin.
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