Rival Friends

Benjamin Markowits on Larkin and Amis, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley and other literary relationships: "All professions produce their friendly rivalries; but in most of them, the friends who come off second best can at least console themselves with the parts of their personality untested by the competition: their human qualities, their loves and pleasures; or the depth of their relation to the world. What's terrible about literary competition is the fact that it puts just that relation to the test; it's unsurprising that so many of these friendships fail on literary grounds."