The early work of an important poet always has a potential interest, since it is likely to contain anticipations of his later, finer poems; in Larkin's case, however, this interest is limited because of the sharp break in his writing after The North Ship.

In 1943 Vernon Watkins came to speak at the Oxford English Club. Larkin was present, and the occasion made a tremendous and lasting impression on him. He never cared much for Watkins's own poems, but he liked the man tremendously, and responded to his enthusiasm for Dylan Thomas and, above all, for W. B. Yeats. ‘Impassioned and imperative, he swamped us with Yeats … I had been tremendously impressed by the evening … As a result, I spent the next three years trying to write like Yeats, not because I liked his personality or understood his ideas, but out of infatuation with his music’ (RW 29). Much of The North Ship almost sounds like a pastiche of Yeats: the poems have little to offer save a clearly derivative music. Not only are they thinner and less interesting than Larkin's mature work; they are arguably less interesting than some of his earlier poems, written when he was still an undergraduate, where the dominant influence is Auden (Auden surfaces again as an influence in the middle stanzas of ‘The Building’, thirty years later). Some of these early sonnets (‘Conscript’, ‘A Writer’, ‘Observation’) could be taken for Auden, whereas such North Ship poems as ‘The moon is full tonight ’ or ‘To write one song, I said’ sound less like Yeats than like imitations of him: even the fact that they have no titles, when we realize how carefully chosen, and how important, the titles of Larkin's mature poems are, may be significant, suggesting that Larkin was quite right when he saw them as based on Yeat 's music rather than his ideas.

By XX Poems, the privately printed volume in 1951, the mature Larkin has begun to appear; with The Less Deceived (which contained more than half of the XX Poems) he has clearly arrived. For many of Larkin's admirers, this remains his finest volume.