In June 1954, Philip Larkin published, in the Leeds-based little magazine Poetry and Audience, a review of A Charm Against the Toothache by John Heath-Stubbs. This makes an interesting conjunction for two reasons. Firstly, Larkin and Heath-Stubbs had known one another at Oxford University during the War, when Heath-Stubbs was a member of the poetic clique that also included Sidney Keyes and Michael Meyer, editors of the anthology Eight Oxford Poets; Larkin, however, had been ‘[t]oo proud, too prickly, and too unsure of himself to join the élite literary set’ (Motion: 45) – yet he still bore a grudge against Meyer in particular for excluding him from the anthology. After Oxford, their careers had followed the pattern established there. Heath-Stubbs had published several collections and made influential friends like T. S. Eliot, who invited him to edit (with David Wright) The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse. Larkin, meanwhile, had resorted to self-publishing his most recent collection, XX Poems, and his next was soon to be published by the small Hull imprint, Marvell Press. Larkin was therefore not only reviewing Heath-Stubbs’s book, but re-viewing their relationship to date.

The second reason is that Poetry and Audience was published from the University of Leeds’s Department of English Literature, where at that time Heath-Stubbs (on the recommendation of Eliot and Herbert Read) held the Gregory Fellowship in Poetry, and was Editorial Advisor to the magazine. Larkin was, as it were, on Heath-Stubbs’s turf. In light of this unequal power dynamic, Larkin’s review was, as his ...