My Proper Ground: A Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and Its Development

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Tolley very honestly and responsibly states the main case against his
book in his prefatory introduction: that Philip Larkin himself disliked
“the notion that the artist is concerned with displaying a vision of
the world.” Yet artists do develop, evolving toward a greater
intellectual understanding, forging an individual style, gaining more
control over the formal aspects of their chosen media. There have been a
number of previous books on Larkin’s poetry, but Tolley’s is the
first to offer a systematic account of the unfolding of his career—a
meticulously chronological study that deals not only with his verse but
also with his early novels and his criticism (which was devoted both to
literary matters and to jazz). While this approach has the disadvantage
of devoting a good deal of space to juvenilia and to unsuccessful
attempts to change direction, it leads eventually to a satisfyingly
comprehensive reading of Tolley’s work.

The result, though rarely dazzling in its insights, is thorough, solid,
and cumulatively authoritative. Tolley is helpful in placing Larkin
within the context of modern English poetry in general and the 1950s
“Movement” in particular. I have, inevitably, a few reservations.
His (admittedly brief) comparison between the responses of the Movement
writers and that of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl seems desperate as well as
forced, and I wish that a copyeditor had challenged some of the
repetitions in the last two chapters. And why did Carleton University
Press choose an uninviting typeface and design that recall
reader-unfriendly textbooks of the late nineteenth century? But these
are minor matters. My Proper Ground is both informed and informative, a
worthwhile contribution to its subject.