“I have never found Larkin an easy poet to like…”. On the contrary, I’ve always loved him since I first read “Toads” in Sound and Sense, a poetry anthology, in

“I have never found Larkin an easy poet to like…”. On the contrary, I’ve always loved him since I first read “Toads” in Sound and Sense, a poetry anthology, in high school. I didn’t understand all of it, but it felt close, maybe because something toad-like squatted in me, too. (Which was true, after nearly forty years from that encounter, I still haven’t been able to say “Stuff your pension”!) He has a follow up to this poem, “Toads Revisited” that I don’t like that much.