Housebuyers in Hull are weighing up the pros of living in the former home of the poet Philip Larkin against the cons of his ferocious diatribes about the building's ugliness, cost and useless central heating system.

Apparently a snip at £165,000, the comfy four bedroom villa in what Larkin described as "a bourgeois area near the university" is haunted by scabrous comments in the writer's diary and letters to friends.

More alarmingly, it has been cast as the death of Larkin's muse, which allowed him only two more noteworthy poems, one a despairing record of squashing a hedgehog while mowing his new home's "boring" lawn. He also groused about problems with neighbours, including a group of nuns, and told his friend Norman Iles in 1975: "I'm not really happy in the house - can't write. Only one poem this year and that a comic one."

Larkin lived for his last nine years in the detached quintessence of regional suburbia, 105 Newland Park, which is now a key stop on Hull's Larkin Trail for tourists. Estate agents Stanisford can (although will not) show clients the approximate site of the hedgehog's death.

His motive for buying was to get closer to Hull University - the agents' main target - where he was head librarian. He was comfortably off after the publication of what proved to be his last collection of poems, High Windows, and he fancied a comfortable berth for his declining years.

Instead, he told the novelist Barbara Pym after his move in 1974, he found he had "an ugly little house, fearfully dear, vast garden at the back but at the side as near to its neighbours as a council estate - washing and children. Oh dear.

"The whole thing is weighing on me rather. It is a graceless house, all what GKC [GK Chesterton] would call 'the wrong shape' and without any amenities."

But James Booth, general secretary of the Philip Larkin Society, said yesterday that the diatribes were less about the house than the poet, whose apparent dislike of No 105 should not be taken at face value. Dr Booth, an English lecturer at Hull University, said: "He was also very rude about some of his best loved friends. That was the thing about Larkin. He would say some terrible things about that which was intimate and close to him."

The Larkin Society itself may solve any sale problems; members have set up a trust to try to buy the "ugly little house" as a shrine.

The poet left the house, the only one he owned, to one of his three girlfriends, Monica Jones. She remained there until her death in February.