Would that it were that simple : Robert Creeley

The Poet of Death

To the Editor, NY Times :

William H. Pritchard's review of Andrew Motion's biography "Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life" (Aug. 1) is characteristic of his wit and ability to compress usefully an engaging range of details. His summary provokes all the old questions about Larkin's hermetic defensiveness and reminds his fellow poets that he certainly earned the hard way all he seemingly got.

But the last two paragraphs of Mr. Pritchard's piece are truly something else. Consider this rhetorical flourish, for example: "Why, some might ask, would one want to read all this when the matchless poems are there, still fresh and glittering as creation itself?" But it is finally the old canonizing flourish Mr. Pritchard then moves to that does us all in: "Say that more than any of them [ Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Stevens and "perhaps Robert Lowell" ] , excepting Hardy, Larkin is the poet of death who, since death is the mother of beauty, brings us most vividly to life." Would that it were that simple.

ROBERT CREELEY Buffalo

A version of this letter appeared in print on Sunday, September 5, 1993, on section 7page 23 of the New York edition.

The poet Robert Creeley died of pneumonia 30 March 2005, aged 78.
Larkin died of oesophageal cancer on 2 December 1985, aged 63.