Larkin's poets
Sir: Stephen Spender rebukes Philip Larkin for only including one facet of Housman — the "Roman-epigrammatic." The truth is that no anthology could do justice to the protean genius of one of the great English poets whose noble stoicism and anguished nostalgia, expressed in language of absolute and marvellously chiselled finality, abide our question less and less as we grow old. But pessimism, anguish and nostalgia apart, with what magic does he portray the processes of nature: But over sea and continent from sight Safe to the Indies has the earth conveyed The vast and moon-eclipsing cone of night, Her towering foolscap of eternal shade.
Only Shakespeare beside him can marshal language with equal majesty. G. Reichardt 12a Mount Pleasant Road, Poole
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