Philip Larkin is one of my heroes. I’m sure he has a place at the top table in the Great Curmudgeon Hall of Fame in the sky.
I have four rolls of pink toilet paper on my low table, more or less at my elbow, but their only significance is that I’ve been too lazy to put them away. Pink is a new departure for me – only just discovered Bronco (why Bronco? Talking Bronco) makes it. Well, it’s curious to begin a letter in this way. I have been alone to the cinema to see some Italian film called Girl in a bikini (remember Maria Allasio) and didn’t much enjoy it. I do think foreign countries look vulgar & ruined. Coming in I ate two buttered pikelets and drank some milk (I’d previously had a Chinese dish at the Red Lion Restaurant. The Chinese are marvellous at making you feel you don’t want any more, without satisfying you.)
– Letter to Monica Jones, 26 November, 1959
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay 
I didn’t realise this. . . “Despite the controversy Larkin was chosen in a 2003 Poetry Book Society survey, almost two decades after his death, as Britain’s best-loved poet of the previous 50 years, and in 2008 The Times named him Britain’s greatest post-war writer.”[8] Wikipedia
I think curmudgeon is an excellent description.
I think poets need to get at the truth of things. Wide-eyed optimists tend not to make great poets and vice versa.