Philip Larkin didn’t need a place in Poets’ Corner – but he deserves it | Blake Morrison

Thirty-one years after his death, the most quotable British poet of the 20th century takes his rightful place in Westminster AbbeyDo poets need monuments? Not according to Horace, writing in the first century BC, who considered his poems to be “a monument more lasting than bronze/And loftier than the pyramids of kings”. Ben Jonson took a similar line when others were campaigning for Shakespeare to be given a place in Westminster Abbey: why bother? “Thou art a Moniment without a