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When Philip Larkin died of cancer of the esophagus in 1985, the obituaries endowed him with near sainthood. His fame was great and his claims on immortality considerable. But a funny thing happened on his way up Parnassus. Thanks to two of Larkin’s literary executors, his reputation has been sinking in a critical storm whose rumblings continue to this moment. With the publication of the Selected Letters by Anthony Thwaite in 1992 and Andrew Motions’s biography in 1993, opinion changed sharply. Larkin had become a racist, a misogynist, foul-mouthed, neurotic, addicted to pornography, a fascist, a politically incorrect misanthropist who belittled even his closest friends. But the relationship between Larkin’s life and work is highly problematic and teasingly oblique. So, for a rightful access to the recent criticism against Larkin, we have to move away from a concern with Larkin as person to a more deep look at his poetry and at its major themes and techniques. In order to understand Larkin’s dichotomy between his social life and his writing life, we should return to the rhetorical strategies which make his poems simultaneously self-revealing and self-protective. He must be estimated and remembered on the basis of his work, not of the biographical details.