In Required Writing the Impulse to Preserve is mentioned often. Larkin the critic, like Larkin the librarian, is a keeper of English literature. Perhaps the librarian is obliged to accession more than a few modern books which the critic would be inclined to turf out, but here again duty has triumphed. As for loss, Larkin the loser is here too (‘deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’) but it becomes clearer all the time that he had the whole event won from the start.

Whether he spotted the daffodil-like properties of deprivation, and so arranged matters that he got more of it, is a complicated question, of the kind which his critical prose, however often it parades a strict simplicity, is equipped to tackle. Subtle, supple, craftily at ease, it is on a par with his poetry — which is just about as high as praise can go. Required Writing would be a treasure-house even if every second page were printed upside-down. Lacking the technology to accomplish this, the publishers have issued the book in paperback only, with no index, as if to prove that no matter how self-effacing its author might be, they can be even more so on his behalf.

The "required" in the title of the new book means, first of all, "produced on request," and Larkin makes a point of never having proposed an article or review to an editor, and of merely developing "someone else's idea" ("He liked to have his mind made up for him," Larkin writes of his hero Louis Armstrong). In view of his reputation as the most sought-after reviewer on the current labor market, his output is small, and the miscellaneous articles are neither numerous nor long. But whatever the occasion, they are pieces to be read and reread...

The piece on Marvell is the prize of the collection. On the phrase "vegetable love," which Eliot had singled out, Larkin quotes a dozen lines of critical jargon ("Vegetable is no vegetable but an abstract and philosophical term…the doctrine of the three souls"), then remarks that "another reader might simply think that 'vegetable' was a good adjective for something that grows slowly." Empson is quoted at even greater length on "To a green thought in a green shade" ("…the seventh Buddhist state of enlightenment") and is similarly punctured by the comment that "another reader might simply think the lines a good description of the mind of someone half-asleep under the summer trees in a garden." On the other hand, Larkin points out that Marvell is the poet of enigma and ambiguity, the poet about whom the reader is never "quite sure how serious he is." This would account for exegeses of the sort at which Larkin likes to poke fun. For Larkin, the "witty, tender elegance" in some of the best-known pieces remains Marvell's greatest accomplishment.