"James Booth reads Philip Larkin's mature poetry in terms of his ambiguous self-image as lonely, anti-social outsider, plighted to his art, and as nine-to-five librarian, sharing the common plight of humanity. Larkin is a poet of inexpressible transcendence, but also of afternoons in the park, housing estates, ambulances, and the toad work. Whether discussing Larkin's poems of love and intimacy or uncovering his hidden metaphorical structures, Booth's focus is always on Larkin's artistry with words, the 'verbal devices' through which this purest of lyric poets celebrates 'the experience, the beauty'. Booth's close readings succeed in opening out wide theoretical perspectives on the relationship between art and biography, the nature of metaphor, and the different modes of elegy."--Jacket.