THE poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) has made it into Poets’ Corner. A memorial slab in his honour has just joined others in the space in Westminster Abbey devoted to Britain’s acknowledged literary greats.

There, Larkin shares the company of major poets stretching from Geoffrey Chaucer (died 1400) to Ted Hughes (1930-1998).

He might not be too bothered. One of his poems, Wants, begins: “Beyond all this, the wish to be alone; However the sky grows dark with invitation cards, However we follow the printed directions of sex, However the family is photographed under the flagstaff – Beyond all this the wish to be alone.”

That’s from his collection The Less Deceived. Published in 1955 it made Larkin’s name.

And here (boast, boast) I can claim to have been ahead of the pack – the literary pack that has finally endorsed Larkin’s greatness. Aged just 17 but already a poetry lover, I bought The Less Deceived. Perhaps now my most valuable book, it’s a slim soft-back, just 42 pages, published by a micro publisher at Hull, where Larkin was a librarian at the city’s University.

What appealed to me was Larkin’s downbeat tone. Typified by Wants, it’s there, too, in lines like: “Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, As epitaph: ‘He chucked up everything, And just cleared off,’ And always the voice will sound, Certain you approve, This audacious, purifying, Elemental move.”

As these quotations illustrate, Larkin’s poetry is crystal clear. He strove to make it so, in a conscious break from what he saw as obscure and difficult “modern” poetry. He believed the poet should do the hard work.

It was Larkin who observed that: “Sexual intercourse began, In nineteen sixty-three, Between the end of the Chatterley ban, And the Beatles first LP.” More notorious are his lines: “They f*** you up, your mum and dad. They fill you with the faults they had, And add some extra, just for you.” An innocent-minded reader’s belief that “f***” was a misprint for “tuck” led another poet, Adrian Mitchell, to produce a parody: “They tuck you up, your mum and dad, They read you Peter Rabbit too…”

Inspired by effigies of a knight and his lady holding hands, engraved on Larkin’s Poets’ Corner stone are the final words of his poem An Arundel Tomb: “What will survive of us is love.” It’s a comforting thought though at odds with Larkin’s general bleakness. A non-believer in God, he wrote terrifyingly of death: “Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”

Larkin’s poetry, like that of Thomas Hardy, whom he admired, springs from the everyday. Of ambulances he observed: “All streets in time are visited.” Young mothers “at swing and sandpit” prompted the reflection: “Their beauty has thickened. Something is pushing them, To the side of their own lives.” And yet the optimism of An Arundel Tomb is found elsewhere, especially in some wonderful nature poems.

While lambs born in snow meet “a vast unwelcome”, awaiting them is “earth’s immeasurable surprise… They could not grasp it if they knew, What so soon will wake and grow, Utterly unlike the snow.” I’ve never begrudged the 6s (30p) that The Less Deceived cost me.