With Great Poems Come Great Responsibility

While we wait to find out who will be named poet laureate of Queens, I turn my attention to Oxford, where Peter Porter has been nominated for the position of Professor of Poetry--an elected position which, until Porter's name was put forth, appeared to be a lock for Christopher Ricks, whose Dylan's Visions of Sin is about to come out in the United States; Sean O'Hagan of The Guardian was unimpressed, as was John Sutherland of The Independent, though the latter paper also published a review by Bryan Cheyette with a bit more enthusiasm, even if "reading Dylan's Visions of Sin can seem like being locked in a room with an encyclopedic uncle who just loves His Bobness to death." Back at The Guardian, meanwhile, poet laureate Andrew Motion concentrated on a braoder view of Ricks' critical approach.

Getting back to the initial matter at hand: this election is moderately big stuff in English intellectual circles; The Independent weighed in back in February. Porter makes a pretty good argument for his rightness for the job:

To me, poetry is essentially something to be read and to be written. I’m not interested in its promulgation by critical insights. I think everybody who reads poetry has his or her own critical take on it. But that’s not the same thing as a counterproductive orthodoxy which is maintained by an academic establishment.

I think it’s good to recognise that poetry is actually written by people outside of universities – to bring that idea back into universities, so that university people don’t think that, because they are the custodians of poetry, they are necessarily equipped to understand it better than people who are not – but who are simply involved in it.