There are a couple of cryptic references in October 1958, starting with: "I hope you are better now – I fear I didn't treat you very considerately! What a 1960 photograph will suggest, first and foremost, to a reader of Larkin’s poetry is the opening stanza of “Annus Mirabilis,” published in 1967, and, along with “This Be the Verse” (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” etc. We had a fine large cavalier time, though, and I look back on it with delight…" The next letter amplifies the mystery: "I'm sorry too that our encounter had such unhappy results for you! They first met at the end of 1946, when both were appointed to positions at Leicester University College, he as an assistant librarian, she as a lecturer in English.

Few moments are sadder than the one when, on a country walk with Monica, he finds out that he can no longer hear the lark singing high overhead. In between apologies for his two timing ways and general inadequacies, he is a kind and funny friend to his Rabbit gal, Monica.He is a bald vulture sitting on a crag; a plant in a pot that nobody waters; an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles.

In accordance with conventional judgment, I saw his talent as peaking in 1964 with The Whitsun Weddings, and declining bleakly thereafter, with too many poems essaying, not always convincingly, variations on the same old personal obsessions that he had lived with since childhood. The technical elements of his writing are left out but the reader can surmise from the context of many letters some idea of meaning.He sometimes confided to friends that while he felt he ought to marry Monica, he wanted to marry Maeve. Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica, published by Faber, covers the period 1945-70, and passively evokes it: digs and lodgings ("I have put in for a flatlet! Photograph: Express/Getty Images Philip Larkin and Monica Jones at the memorial service for Sir John Betjeman, Westminster Abbey, London, 1984. Fascinating insight into the life of poet Philip Larkin revealed through a long-term correspondence. He published four volumes of poetry - The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) - for which he received innumerable honours including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the WH Smith Award.

The reasons he gives Monica for not marrying her (often rehearsed) are the same reasons he surely gave himself for not leaving her. The photograph also makes them look as though they had, in some sense, been living in a time warp: there is an unmistakable air of the late 1940s about them, and each in his or her way—Larkin more noticeably, as their correspondence hints—had a distinct aversion to the unwelcome business of growing up.Yet whatever he did, whatever she said, for four tumultuous decades they remained together, if separate, and for the last few years, when sickness made inroads on both, not even separate. Anyway, "taking care of business" (to paraphrase Aretha Franklin) was definitely not this man's game. He frequently wrote her about the progress of what he was working on and about the activities involved in getting published and giving readings.

They liked Beatrix Potter even when she strayed beyond bunnies, with Larkin declaring that he would sacrifice Joyce, Proust and Mann (foreigners all, admittedly, and he had become scrupulously xenophobic) for The Tailor of Gloucester. This is a proper correspondence, intelligent but easy, fluent, encouraging; we see the charm and the point of sitting down, at the end of the day, or the beginning of an evening, and putting one's thoughts into writing, and sending them off to someone we love. I never left the house without the sense of walking into a cooler, cleaner, saner and pleasanter atmosphere. Although the trajectory of Larkin's relationship with Kingsley Amis was already evident in the 1992 Selected Letters (edited, as is the current volume, by Anthony Thwaite), Letters to Monica adds substance and detail: undergraduate infatuation, measured disaffection, growing irritation, unregulated envy (envy being best understood as empathy gone wrong), a bourgeois distaste for bohemianism ("Patsy says [so-and-so's] house is filthy. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.With all this in mind, I went back to Letters to Monica, and saw how much, in his own twisted and inarticulate way, they do indeed embody Larkin’s own yearnings, choked always under his self-preservative instinct (“The difficult part of love/Is being selfish enough.