This book explores Larkin's distinctive place within the poetry of the twentieth century. It includes discussion of Larkin's response to the academic professionalization of poetry fostered by "difficult" Modernism; his diverse poetry of love (in relation to the responses of the poems' addressees); his original development of the genres of reflective elegy and self-elegy; the key metaphor of the domestic interior; history versus historicism; the poetry of place ("here" or Hull); and the profane and sacred (focusing on his animal poems).