As a female herself, Nicola Healey is ideally placed to cast a critical eye over Sinéad Morrissey's reinterpretation of Philip Larkin's view of women, and she does so to excellent effect in her recent essay on Wild Court, which begins as follows:
In Sinéad Morrissey’s collection On Balance (2017), Morrissey selectively quotes from Larkin’s ‘Born Yesterday’ (1954) as the epigraph to her titular poem, ‘On Balance’. She decontextualises his lines, however, to bolster her poem’s feminist drive, distorting Larkin’s poem and misleading the reader from the outset...
Healey then goes on to address wider contemporary concerns about Larkin's stance, making pertinent points not only about recent bandwagons but also homing in on current unease, not just in Larkin's case, when considering pieces of art alongside the biography of the person who created them. She comes to the conclusion that...
...Larkin the man is not beyond reproach, but for the hard-won gifts he bequeathed to us, Larkin the poet deserves more than this.
However, rather than just tasting these morsels, why don't you read the essay in full over at Wild Court (see here) and savour its nuanced flavours?
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