A longtime jazz and blues enthusiast, Larkin drew upon both kinds of music as his model for a poetry that would oppose the modernism of Eliot and Pound. In Larkin's Blues, B. J. Leggett not only masterfully demonstrates the extent to which Larkin's "jazz life, " as he referred to it, informed his poetry but also effectively articulates the wider confluence of music and poetry. This accessible study incorporates jazz and blues criticism and discussion of such artists as Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, and the Beatles to illustrate the significance of musical intertext in Larkin's poetry.

Although Larkin's Blues analyzes the place of jazz and other forms of popular music in Larkin's texts, it also considers the philistine manner that dictated, among other things, Larkin's antimodernist stance; the persona he assumes in his poems and reviews; his use of common language; his conception of his audience; and his position on the direction English poetry should take in the twentieth century.

Larkin's middle-class pose and his love for jazz and other forms of popular music are inextricably connected in his poems, but there is no doubt that jazz was for Larkin the epitome of an antielitist, unacademic art, the musical equivalent of a kind of poetry that would revolutionize twentieth-century verse. Leggett's innovative approach to this controversial cultural icon's canon affirms Larkin's place as oneof the most influential poets of the twentieth century.