DRAWING capacity audiences for his one-man tribute to Philip Larkin at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Tom Courtenay admits to having only recently "discovered' the late poet.

Just a year younger than the 65-year-old actor, I can claim a rather longer liking for Larkin.

A poetry-loving schoolboy back in 1955, I bought a copy of The Less Deceived, the collection that made Larkin's name, on the strength of a review in the Times Literary Supplement. I have the yellowed cutting yet, assuring me that the collection "should establish Mr Philip Larkin as a poet of quite exceptional importance.''

Clipped to this review is another, from The Listener, which praised Larkin for writing poems that "have beginnings, middles and ends." This might be what chiefly commended Larkin to a 17-year-old who had been struggling with the obscurities of established contemporary poets - though there was also a quote guaranteed to grab an adolescent male. Ahem:

"So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd

Leaves me flushed and stirred,

Like

Then she undid her dress..."

When the slim, limp-backed volume arrived, there was much else that appealed. And if it seems odd that a poem, Next, Please, which pictures our hopes for the future as a "sparkling armada of promises,'' doomed to yield to a single "black-sailed unfamiliar'' could speak to a mere teenager, then it is scarcely less remarkable that Larkin, still in the prime of life at 33, should already be brooding on death, his most persistent theme.

What Courtenay says most struck him about Larkin's poetry was its humanity. Spot on. I never see an ambulance without murmuring a Larkin line on the subject: "All streets in time are visited.'' And what of young mothers "at swing and sandpit''? As Larkin acutely observed:

Their beauty has thickened.

Something is pushing them

To the side of their own lives.

Larkin's poetry is full of such insights.

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

Shaped to the comfort of the last to go.

I thought of that when my mother died and we had to clear the house.

Not that Larkin is always gloomy. An underrated poet of nature, he puts a glorious spin on the sight of new-born lambs bleating in wet snow:

They could not grasp it if they knew

What so soon will wake and grow

Utterly unlike the snow.

Since his death in 1985 his reputation has been tarnished, particularly by the revelation of a taste for pornography. And is it relevant that he could be rude to people at bus stops - earning the adjective curmudgeonly, which is now almost routinely attached to his name?

No. The poems contain what Larkin wanted to say to the world. He wouldn't have suffered the torment of writing them otherwise. And for me the essence is the lesson he drew from the accidental mangling of a hedgehog with his hover mower:

...we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.