The electorate numbers more than 250,000 – all Oxford graduates who have bothered to collect their degree. The duties – one lecture a term for five years – are almost as paltry as the annual salary of £12,000. So the five-yearly contest to be elected Oxford University’s professor of poetry may seem an unlikely provoker of tabloid headlines, but over the years it has witnessed what one eminent, outraged academic called “indignities more suited to the Miss World contest”.
Previous occupants of the hallowed Oxford chair, regarded as second only to the poet laureateship in British poetic prestige, include such grandees as Matthew Arnold, Cecil Day-Lewis, WH Auden, Robert Graves and Seamus Heaney. But 20th-century nominees also included a computer, a county hall caretaker, Muhammad Ali, Mao Zedong and the then prime minister’s wife, Mary Wilson. In 1968, an undergraduate rode naked through the streets of Oxford in support of her own unlikely candidate, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, during an unprecedented student ballot, which made no difference, anyway.
The current holder, Geoffrey Hill, was elected in 2010 only after the sole female victor in the post’s 300-year history, Ruth Padel, stood down after charges that she had leaked details of supposed sexual harassment in the past of her prime challenger, the Nobel prize-winner Derek Walcott.
This time around, at least all five nominees write poetry. One might moonlight as a neuropsychologist, another live in Athens, a third declare that he long ago resolved “never to make a living from poetry or by teaching it”. But the frontrunners are both universally admired poets: the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, and Yorkshire-born Simon Armitage, winner of several awards.
Thanks to recent rule changes, this year’s race has proved more decorous than most. For the first time, a minimum of 50 publicly named nominees are required, rather than just two – often mischief-makers. Since the last election in 2010, moreover, electors can vote online rather than being required to report to Oxford’s polling booths in person.
Founded in 1708, the professorship first foundered in the mid-20th century, when a succession of literary critics prompted a slogan daubed all over Oxford walls: “A poet, not a critic!” In 1951, Day-Lewis narrowly won the day for the poets against his Cambridge namesake, the critic CS Lewis. In 1956, Auden – running on the manifesto “a poet will talk nonsense, but it will probably be interesting nonsense” – beat the Shakespearean scholar G Wilson Knight and the first of many “rogue” candidates, the diplomat Harold Nicolson.
Resident abroad, like his successor Robert Graves, Auden managed to persuade the authorities to allow him to deliver all three lectures in one term. During his few weeks each year in Oxford, he would sit in his slippers in the Cadena cafe, granting audiences to aspirant poets, a scene that reminded one observer of “a huge, craggy-faced Socrates among the tidy women shoppers”.
Much of Auden’s major criticism in his collection The Dyer’s Hand began life as these Oxford lectures. In the chair’s long history, however, the only other major critical works it has fathered have been Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and AC Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy.
When I visited Auden in Oxford during the 1973 election, a few months before his death, he joined his predecessor, Day-Lewis, in pronouncing the whole business “out of date”. The students, he also argued, should have a vote: “After all, they’re the ones who have to listen to the bloody lectures!”
Auden fondly remembered the professor’s other duties – judging university prizes and delivering the Creweian Oration in Latin every other year (before which he admitted to “getting tanked up on champagne”). But he was resentful that the then professor, Roy Fuller, had “funked it” by resorting to mere English. It was little more than a century since Matthew Arnold had broken the 150-year-old tradition of delivering all the lectures in Latin. “Punk!” sneered Auden.
In 1961, when Latin still held sway, Robertus Graves had beaten a rare Cambridge protest candidate, FR Leavis, thanks to posters all over town with elegiac couplets in Latin punning on the resemblance of his name to gravis, serious, and Leavis’s to levis, slight.
Five years later, the American poet Robert Lowell appeared to be heading for a walkover when the don Enid Starkie, an inveterate, self-styled “mischief-maker”, proposed the war poet Edmund Blunden, who was immediately subjected to patronising abuse, not least because he had kept wicket for Hong Kong University until well into his 60s. Then 70 and not in the best of health, Blunden pronounced the whole business “a bullfight” after winning a surprise victory.
The 1968 lists were opened by Barry MacSweeney, a 20-year-old Newcastle corporation gardener, at the time “a poet on the dole”. Next came Mrs Wilson, until she found out about it and withdrew. Then a Balliol historian, Richard Cobb, got “yes, perhaps, a little drunk” at a Merton party and fired off a telegram to his friend Christopher Hill, master of Balliol: “support nomination of Yevtushenko”. Fine, except that he signed it André Malraux.
A student ballot also endorsed the celebrated Russian poet. But would Yevtushenko be allowed to travel to Oxford from the then USSR? A student journalist’s phone call to Brezhnev at the Kremlin raised only an office cleaner, who thought he “probably would”. The more pressing problem was that he couldn’t speak English.
The student magazine Isis, then edited by a much younger version of your correspondent, threw its wholly ineffectual weight behind the poet Al Alvarez, who thought he had “as much chance as Governor Wallace” in the simultaneous US presidency race. The poet Roy Fuller had the support of many big-name literarati; Kathleen Raine was adjudged “an outsider to watch”. Less well-known names such as Joseph Braddock and Paul Rosenberg, who respectively declared all 20th-century poetry “jazzy, hoodlum stuff” and “crap”, excitedly joined the fray.
Welsh bard Caradog Prichard had the support of the Daily Telegraph, where he worked as a subeditor, while the Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges was championed by the modern languages faculty. Alan Bold, a socialist Scot, thundered down from Edinburgh “to add a little sanity to the proceedings”. A TV confrontation between Bold and MacSweeney was never shown because it ended in blows.
The journalist Bernard Levin put himself forward on the strength of “an improper limerick I once wrote about Tariq Ali”. The computer was withdrawn when it transpired that it could be programmed to write poetry, but not to give lectures. Fuller, who doubled as a solicitor for the Woolwich Building Society, wound up winning “a victory for common sense”. Pritchard’s 29 votes corresponded with the number of Fleet Street MAs he had brought to Oxford in a charabanc with a well-stocked bar. The hapless Bold received no votes at all – not even those of his nominators. When Yevtushenko and Borges supporters demanded an honorary degree for their men in recompense, the TLS recommended Bold for an honorary O-level.
Among those to decline nomination that year were TS Eliot, John Betjeman – “I have nothing to say about poetry” – and Philip Larkin. In a letter discovered this month, Larkin told his would-be nominator that the job sounded like it would entail “a lot of sherry-drill with important people”. Literary parties were his idea of “hell on earth”.
Nigerian-born, US-based octogenarian Soyinka appeared to stand this year’s best chance of upsetting Armitage, the home-grown favourite, until a recent burst of publicity, when Melvyn Bragg publicly switched his allegiance from Soyinka, his own nominee, to Armitage on the grounds that “Soyinka has not written much poetry recently and I wonder how often he would bother to come to Oxford”.
Bragg says he was not, as quoted, concerned about Soyinka’s age: “Geoffrey Hill, also over 80, was a fine choice.” He simply “changed my mind in the light of fresh information”. Soyinka may be “worth the highest honours Oxford can bestow”, but Bragg now considers Armitage the better choice: “He is a fine poet, ready to give ample time to the post and capable of enthusing a new generation in his lectures.”
All this provoked a caustic response from Soyinka, moving another of this year’s nominees, Ian Gregson, to protest that Soyinka had failed to offer a manifesto: “All his demeanour suggests he will not be hands-on.” Athens-based AE (Alicia) Stallings and psychotherapist Seán Haldane maintained a dignified silence. With no opinion polls to mislead us, it now seems likely that Friday will see Keats’s “beaded bubbles blinking at the brim” for the sometime probation officer Simon Armitage.
OXFORD PROFESSOR OF POETRY: THE CONTENDERS
Simon Armitage has published 21 collections of poetry and two novels as well as translations of Homer’s Odyssey and the Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He is professor of poetry at Sheffield University. 4/1
Ian Gregson, professor of English at the University of Bangor, has published poetry, novels and criticism (including an admiring critique of his opponent Simon Armitage). 12/1
Psychotherapist Seán Haldane has published seven volumes of poetry and an award-winning crime novel. In 2010, he told the Observer that poetry had “more capacity to change people than psychotherapy”. 16/1
Imprisoned during the Nigerian civil war, now a professor in California, Wole Soyinka has published poetry, plays, novels, essays and translations. He won the 1986 Nobel literature prize for his “wide cultural perspective”. 1/3
AE Stallings has published three books of poetry including the award-winning Archaic Smile (1999) and a verse translation of Lucretius. She lives in Athens. 5/1
Odds taken from Ladbrokes
