And I, whose childhood Is a forgotten boredom, Feel like a child Who comes on a scene Of adult reconciling, And can understand nothing But the unusua… - Philip Larkin

You know I don’t care at all for politics, intelligently. I found that at school when we argued all we did was repeat the stuff we had, respectively, learnt from the Worker, the Herald, Peace News, the Right Book Club (that was me, incidentally: I knew these dictators, Marching Spain, I can remember them now) and as they all contradicted each other all we did was get annoyed. I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, & therefore I abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation. It’s true that the writers I grew up to admire were either non-political or Left-wing, & that I couldn’t find any Right-wing writer worthy of respect, but of course most of the ones I admired were awful fools or somewhat fakey, so I don’t know if my prejudice for the Left takes its origin there or not. But if you annoy me by speaking your mind in the other interest, it’s not because I feel sacred things are being mocked but because I can’t reply, not (as usual) knowing enough. … By the way, of course I’m terribly conventional, by necessity! Anyone afraid to say boo to a goose is conventional.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word — the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.