This study of Philip Larkin challenges recent attempts to interpret Larkin's poems by decoding their supposed religious, political or sexual subtexts. Booth argues that historical and social circumstances are, as Larkin himself believed, the context not the substance of his work. He treats Larkin as a deliberate artist, rather than as a political symptom or sexual case-history. By extensive reference to the letters, interviews and prose writings he shows that Larkin's vivid self-image as a patriotic Tory bachelor was an indulgence confined to his later "required" writing. Close readings of a range of Larkin's best loved, as well as lesser known, poems demonstrate that they operate on a more profound imaginative level; either treating universal themes, or alternatively dramatizing and ironising ideological stereotypes in order to create embodiments of experience beyond or beneath ideology.