Your person, your place

Philip Larkin has, I think, antecendents in the nineteenth century, in writers like Hardy and Swinburne, but he's deeply modern as well, in that bleak, self-pitying, tragic-banal kind of way. This rare interview in the Paris Review in 1982 gives an insight into his character (he was a crabby librarian), and it concludes with this interesting reflection on poetry:  

“You must realize I’ve never had ‘ideas’ about poetry. To me it’s always been a personal, almost physical release or solution to a complex pressure of needs—wanting to create, to justify, to praise, to explain, to externalize, depending on the circumstances. And I’ve never been much interested in other people’s poetry—one reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to read.”

Places, Loved Ones

No, I have never found
The place where one could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay;
Nor met my special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name;

To find such seems to prove
You want no choice in where
To build, or whom to love;
You ask them to bear
You off irrevocably,
So that it's not your fault
Should the town turn dreary
Or the girl a dolt.

Yet, having missed them, you're
Bound, none the less, to act
As if what you settled for
Mashed you, in fact;
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled-for to this day
Your person, your place.