THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS by Philip Larkin. 46 pages. Random House. $4.
Eliot lies in ashes. Auden flogs his muse infrequently in exile. England, for so many centuries "a nest of singing birds," finds herself today unwontedly in want of a great poet she can call her own. Yet in a quiet nook of Yorkshire, a strange bird occasionally lifts his voice to cantillate the fierce interior music of a tortured and solitary sensibility:
Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link...