Since Philip Larkin never married, and never owned a house until he was over 50, he spent most of his adult life in rented accommodation. This began in Wellington, where his first lodgings were small, chilly, and lacking in privacy; as he grew more prosperous his lodgings naturally became more spacious, culminating in the comfortable flat in Pearson Park where he lived for eighteen years; but he never lost the feeling of rootlessness, and out of it came one of his bleakest and most powerful poems, ‘Mr Bleaney’:

The clinical, appraising glance that registers the expected drawbacks (‘Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook | Behind the door, no room for books or bags’) shows us that the speaker is all too familiar with life in hired rooms, and the moment of decision (‘I'll take it ’) is not heroic but a tired acceptance of the inevitable. ‘So it happens that I lie |Where Mr Bleaney lay’; and the rest of the poem sets forth the poet's feelings of frustration by means of a speculation about the predecessor he never met. ‘I know his habits’, he tells us, learnt obviously from the talkative landlady; then he lists these habits in all their emptiness, and concludes:

This is a masterly use of syntax. Do these frightening thoughts belong to Mr Bleaney, or to the poet? The externals of a person's life are available to observation, the feelings are known only to himself; so we would naturally assume this chilling account of futility to be an account of how the poet himself feels – except that he is careful not to say so.