Reviewing Philip Larkin's Collected Poems in the New York Review of Books, Derek Walcott expressed some astonishment at the poet's choice of vocation:

"Benedict" [sic] seems better than "bachelor" when we think of Larkin because of the word's monkish associations, suggesting his medieval patience in waiting for the right phrase to come, as well as what seemed to his readers to be a willful self-immolation as a librarian in Hull - since nothing seems more ordinary, more mediocre than that.