Lord Byron wrote of 'Johnny Keats' piss-a-bed poetry' Photo: (Lord Byron 1788-1824) Rex Features
We all know about famous poetic friendships — Wordsworth and Coleridge, Eliot and Pound — but an equally strong tradition in English literature has been the poetic feud. In the 18th century Alexander Pope mocked the banal rhymes of his rivals: “Wher’er you find 'the cooling western breeze’, / In the next line, it 'whispers through the trees’.” The Romantics were no friendlier: Byron wrote of “Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry”.
Modern poets seem to be doing their best to keep up. After months of acrimony, the Poetry Society brouhaha seems finally to have been laid to rest this week with the resignation of Fiona Sampson, a poet who had edited the society’s magazine. She had been in dispute with the director of the society, Judith Palmer, who resigned in July.
Explanations for the dispute’s origins range from a disagreement over where their £360,000 funding from the Arts Council should be spent, or just that Sampson and Palmer didn’t get on. “I have not picked a fight with Judith Palmer,” Sampson has said, “and I’m not interested in picking a fight.”
Professional poets are few in number, and they have to fight over even fewer rewards. So many were surprised when Alice Oswald withdrew her Memorial from the TS Eliot Prize shortlist last year. She objected to the £15,000 prize being funded by the investment company Aurum. “Poetry should be questioning, not endorsing, such institutions,” said Oswald, and her fellow shortlisted poet John Kinsella agreed. “The business of Aurum does not sit with my personal politics and ethics,” he said.
Righteous as their decision may have been, though, by pulling out they were implying the other shortlisted poets were money-grabbers. Soon afterwards I received a text from a well-known poet: “I wish I was a purist like Oswald, who happens to be an aristocrat.”
If it’s not money then it’s sex. In 2009 Ruth Padel was the first woman to be elected as Oxford Professor of Poetry. But Padel resigned after it was revealed that before the vote she had suggested a journalist check out a book called The Lecherous Professor, which included allegations of sexual harassment made against her rival for the post, the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.
But the feuds that will echo down the ages are about the work. So when the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Sir Geoffrey Hill, attacked the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, it was no mere spat. Hill said that Duffy’s ambition to make more people write poetry was undermined by her quoting “from a poem by herself that could easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage”, adding that “I would not myself have the moral courage to write so.” The vexatious spirit of Pope is alive and well.
If it’s not money then it’s sex. In 2009 Ruth Padel was the first woman to be elected as Oxford Professor of Poetry. But Padel resigned after it was revealed that before the vote she had suggested a journalist check out a book called The Lecherous Professor, which included allegations of sexual harassment made against her rival for the post, the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.
But the feuds that will echo down the ages are about the work. So when the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Sir Geoffrey Hill, attacked the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, it was no mere spat. Hill said that Duffy’s ambition to make more people write poetry was undermined by her quoting “from a poem by herself that could easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage”, adding that “I would not myself have the moral courage to write so.” The vexatious spirit of Pope is alive and well.