Larkin is an Englishman, steeped in a sense of the English past. His poetry is that of a man conscious he is living in an old country, affected by the signs of its antiquity, not just in churches and monuments, but in human traits. His 1960 poem “MCMXIV”, conveys how quickly the present becomes the past, thinking of the men of 1914, on the bank holiday weekend when war was about to be declared, “the sun/ On moustached archaic faces”. Larkin conjures up that vanished age through its everyday matters:

The farthings and sovereigns,

And dark-clothed children at play

Called after kings and queens,

The tin advertisements

For cocoa and twist, and the pubs

Wide open all day.

He was famous for his difficulties with girls – as his friend and conspirator Kingsley Amis would have put it – and perhaps summed up those best of all in these lines:

The difficult part of love

Is being selfish enough,

Is having the blind persistence

To upset an existence

Just for your own sake.

What cheek it must take.

He was famous, too, for his gloom, communicated with astonishing economy. In “Dockery and Son”, going back to Oxford more than 20 years after he was an undergraduate (“black-gowned, unbreakfasted, and still half-tight”), now dressed in a dark suit, he acknowledges a remark from a don. The scene is encapsulated in just five words: “Death-suited, visitant, I nod.” He goes on: “Life is first boredom, then fear./ Whether or not we use it, it goes”.

That gloom seeps out in comic form in “Annus Mirabilis”, when he talks of sexual intercourse beginning in 1963 – “which was rather late for me” – and in “This Be the Verse”, about what “your mum and dad” do to you. His political cynicism mounts as his poetic muse fades: “When the Russian tanks roll westward, what defence for you and me?/ Colonel Sloman’s Essex Rifles? The Light Horse of the LSE?” (Sloman was vice-chancellor of Essex University).

But then – and this brings us back to why the bunting is not being put out for Larkin – he was rather Right-wing. Perhaps, as I predicted last year, he is being shunned for his bilious private doggerel – written for like-minded friends – that poured abuse on trades unions, Labour ministers and immigrants. Is our last great poet in the process of being cancelled? Surely not: but we shall know for certain by August 9.