By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Sympathy in White Major’ contains perhaps the most mouth-watering description of someone making a gin and tonic to be found in all English poetry. But it is also, like many Philip Larkin poems, about the relation between the self and society, between the individual and the world around him (and in Larkin it is a him). What follows are some notes towards an analysis of this intriguing poem.