By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Philip Larkin completed ‘Mr Bleaney’ in May 1955, and it appeared nine years later in his third major volume of poems, The Whitsun Weddings (1964). The poem is about a professional man renting a room in a woman’s house, and musing on the life of the previous tenant, ‘Mr Bleaney’. In this post we offer some notes towards an analysis of the poem.