The critic in search of Larkin's ‘sources’ will have a tough time of it. It is hard to imagine Larkin himself enthusiastic about such a quest: he thought poetry should issue out of what he called ‘unsorted experience’ – ‘I tried to keep literature out of my poems’, he said. His literary personality was defined against that of modernist scholar-magpies like Eliot and Auden – poets he respected, but warily. In a review of 1960 he reproached Auden for intellectualism and arch literary game-playing – implicitly, the antithesis of his own poetry, which was to be understood as a record of personal experience.