Does it matter that after nearly four centuries the post of poet laureate is held by a woman? It’s no bad thing, certainly — let the makers of Doctor Who take note. But far more important is that the post is held by a poet of skill, talent and great heart, qualities that Carol Ann Duffy possesses in ample measure.

If she hesitated over accepting the post, as is rumoured, I don’t blame her. At 53 she is in her prime; and while I am sure she will be going strong in ten years’ time, she will be entitled, it must be said, to a bus pass.

A decade is a long time to do any job, however much you like it, and if the last laureate’s thoughts on the matter are anything to go by, it is no easy ride.

Now that the post no longer lasts a lifetime, surely there is a strong argument for an annual or biennial handover, such as exists in the United States.

There, too, the post is splendidly described by the Library of Congress: the poet laureate “serves as the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans”.

I would like to think of Carol Ann Duffy and her electric, eclectic verse as a lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Britons — whatever form that impulse takes.

Duffy is a model for poets both practised and aspiring, in part because she is much more than a poet. She writes for children as well as adults and has published picture books for children as well as books of poetry. She has written plays for the stage and for radio and has edited two fine anthologies, Out of Fashion and Answering Back.

She is perhaps best known for her 1999 collection, The World’s Wife, a subversive and witty voicing of women silenced by literature. If you wonder what Mrs Tiresias thought of his sex change (“Then he started his period./ One week in bed./ Two doctors in./ Three painkillers four times a day.”) or how it was for Mrs Midas (“And who, when it comes to the crunch, can live/ With a heart of gold?”), Duffy has the answers.

But it was her most recent collection for adults, The Rapture, that consolidated her position as a writer at the top of her game. Rightly the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2005, this slender book charts the course of a love affair in language original and mythical, in verse both ordered and free.

“Love’s time’s beggar, but even a single hour,/ bright as a dropped coin, makes love rich./ We find an hour together, spend it not on flowers/ or wine, but on the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch,” she writes in Hour.

In Rapture she does what true poets do best, which is to make the personal universal and that, surely, is the true job of the laureate.

Will Duffy end up writing poems for Edward and Sophie, as she once famously scorned to do? You never know; but there is no doubt that she will make the post her own.

A real poet cannot help but be a lightning rod, and Carol Ann Duffy is as real as they come.

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