His earliest published poem, ‘Winter Nocturne’ (printed in his school magazine in 1938), clearly shows the influence of Yeats, from the mid 1940s, however, he discovered a new model of poetic restraint in Hardy.

Much of Larkin’s subsequent poetry was to bypass Modernist experiment and high-flown languages in favour of traditional metrical forms and a precise and plain diction. The two later collections, The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974), point not simply to the sharpness of Larkin’s ear for the inflexions of his own age, but also to a new and, at the time, deliberately provocative frankness.

Larkin’s present, a late 1950s present in the poems “The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Afternoons’, is that of an England of false cheer, cheap fashions, joyless wedding parties, drab recreation grounds, and ‘estatefuls’ of washing.