New Left Review I/200, July-August 1993
Christopher Hitchens
Something about the Poems: Larkin and ‘Sensitivity’
To Julian Barnes, on 27 September 1985, Philip Larkin wrote concerning an encounter with almost the only woman he ever admitted to ‘adoring’:
Your anecdote reminds me of a brief exchange I once had with Mrs T., who told me she liked my wonderful poem about a girl. My face must have expressed incomprehension. ‘You know’, she said. ‘Her mind was full of knives.’ I took that as a great compliment—I thought that if it weren’t spontaneous she’d have got it right—but I am a child in these things. I also thought that she might think a mind full of knives rather along her own lines, not that I don’t kiss the ground she treads.
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