Anthony Thwaite

 I should have done this earlier but there's been a lot of throughput to put through lately.

 

Anthony Thwaite, who died aged 90 recently, was a very worthwhile poet in his own right but each age has only space for a handful of names to be remembered by and, as he so memorably rhymed them in one of his best-known poems, there were a lot of them and he might not be among the front rank. It will be as the editor of Larkin's Collected Poems, twice, the Selected Letters and Letters to Monica that he is likely to be best remembered. Such is the lot of many, to be bracketed as a surrogate of a bigger name.

Sunday Afternoons and Mr. Cooper, two of the three Thwaite poems selected by Larkin for the Oxford Book of C20th English Verse, are Larkinesque but he wasn't as much of an imitator as those choices would suggest. 

At the first Philip Larkin Society Conference at Hull in 1997, he was the life and soul of the party. I'm sure I wasn't the only beneficiary of his opinion at the time that Larkin was a 'great, minor' poet, like Herbert. One thing Larkin might not have been expected to do was edit a volume of Japanese verse, which was what he had due out soon then.

Lisa Jardine had been invited as a guest speaker to that event and Anthony made quite an act of reading out her letter subsequently declining the opportunity. The implication was clearly that Prof. Jardine had thought better of a difficult away fixture, not being herself in sympathy with the perceived mysogyny, misanthropy and racism of the Larkin found in the letters.

Over breakfast, the conversation had turned to music. One unwary participant ill-advisedly professed a liking for Country & Western.

Country & Western ???!!! in his sometimes imperious manner was all he needed to say to dismiss that offer.

I also saw him at Cheltenham where he discussed the Letters to Monica with Martin Amis and Andrew Motion and signed my copy in the Waterstone's tent. He was less forthcoming that day but, dealing with a queue and having gone the distance with Amis, that was understandable.

It is to be hoped his finely-made, observant poems last alongside the midwife work he did organizing his more illustrious friend's work for posterity.