Philip Larkin wrote poems in a stubbornly old-fashioned manner adopted from Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats: most feature set stanzas, regular meter and well-chosen rhymes that clinch his arguments or observations. His matter, meanwhile, is almost always dire: loneliness and the difficulty of love, the obscenity of growing old, the inevitability of death. What makes it all bearable is his absolute frankness and brilliant—if sometimes shocking— sense of humor.