A handwritten poem by Philip Larkin has sold for £7,500 in London.

Titled Love, it was written in 1962 on a sheet of paper apparently torn from a notebook.

Its first lines read: “The difficult part of love/ Is being selfish enough,/ Is having the blind persistence/ To upset an existence/ Just for your own sake.”

The poem was published in Critical Quarterly in 1966.

According to auctioneer Bonhams, Larkin said in a letter that he had forgotten he wrote the poem, but that he “thought it rather good”.

Bonhams called it the first autographed manuscript by the English poet to be auctioned.

It said yesterday’s sale price almost doubled the initial estimate of up to £4,000.