It used to be a job for life but then, on the death of Ted Hughes in 1999,
Andrew Motion became the first Poet Laureate to be appointed for a fixed
term of ten years. His time is up next May, much to his relief, and Andy
Burnham, the Culture Secretary, has begun the process to select his
replacement.
He has said, rightly, that the public ought be involved. This is not likely to
mean a public vote. We don't want to turn the process into Strictly Come
Rhyming. John Sergeant would probably get the job if it were. But there is
scope for public argument and debate about who the next Poet Laureate should
be - so the Government will seek advice from academics, poetry specialists
and the public.
One view is that this time, surely, whoever wins should be a she. The previous
19 holders of the post have all been men - and in Carol Ann Duffy, Wendy
Cope, Lavinia Greenlaw, Jackie Kay, Fleur Adcock and Ruth Padel, there is no
shortage of suitable candidates.
But there is a bigger question, too, and it is this: what is the point of the
Poet Laureate and why do we need one at all?
The next Laureate will find no job description as such. On the first day, he
or she will receive no helpful manual, no induction from human resources and
no talk on health and safety. The salary is low - £5,000 - and no longer
includes any alcohol, although the first Poet Laureate, John Dryden,
received a pension of £300 and a butt of “best canary wine”. There isn't
even a public service agreement target for stanzas or word count.
At the moment, the process by which the Poet Laureate is selected is, like
many aspects of the British honours system, secretive for reasons that
nobody can remember. Even the reason why it is a secret is a secret.
Once upon a time, as the Prime Minister's adviser on culture, media and sport,
and therefore nominally a part of the process, I tried to unearth one of the
committees that ostensibly recommends people for honours. After a fruitless
half hour wandering the labyrinths of 70 Whitehall, I concluded that the
complexity of the corridors was a metaphor for the British constitution and
gave up. And I was meant to be part of the process. I have never, to this
day, met anyone else who was.
The formal procedure is easy enough to describe. The Laureate is chosen by the
monarch from a list of nominees compiled on behalf of the Prime Minister.
After the advisers in Downing Street have pitched in, the Prime Minister
makes a recommendation to the Queen. Provided she assents, of course, the
Lord Chamberlain then appoints the Poet Laureate by issuing a warrant to the
Laureate-elect. The appointment is then, rather quaintly, announced in The
London Gazette. In practice, a lot of work goes into ensuring that the
designated Laureate will actually take the job. You don't want any
grandstanding as some poet writes a few stanzas condemning the latest war,
then declines the job. And this is not a job that every poet wants, by any
means. Thomas Gray declined, so did Sir Walter Scott, and so did Philip
Larkin in 1984. Even the prospect of beating his old rival Ted Hughes didn't
tempt him into taking the job. It was probably just as well: someone who
once complained that the sky had grown dark with invitation cards was
temperamentally unsuited to the public role.
When Andrew Motion was appointed ten years ago, Tony Blair told him that he
didn't have to do anything if he didn't feel like it. Strictly speaking,
this is true - and his critics would say that Motion took the former Prime
Minister's words rather too much to heart.
In the second half of his term in office, and by his own admission, Motion
could hardly write a word except by commission. He would probably concede
also that some of his royal commemorations, such as the one about the
wedding of the Earl and Countess of Wessex, or the rap that he composed for
Prince William's 21st birthday in 2003, are unlikely to make it into the
Selected Poems. Neither, probably, will the verse commemorating the Trades
Union Congress - surely the only example of both starting and finishing a
genre in a single poem.
But, if Motion's poetry left something to be desired, the poet himself was a
conspicuous success as a public advocate of the beauty of the written word.
He has been as much a peripatetic poetry teacher as a poet. He was a driving
force behind the online National Poetry Archive that contains recordings of
poets reciting their own work. He has campaigned for the Heritage Lottery
Fund rules to be changed to allow the preservation of contemporary British
poetry manuscripts. He has served as chairman of the Museums, Libraries and
Archives Council (MLA). He has, in short, redefined the role of Poet
Laureate as a champion of poetry to the nation, rather than just a gun for
hire.
That, though, is exactly how it started. The job of Poet Laureate was at first
that of a straightforward propagandist. John Dryden was appointed by Charles
II in 1668 to be a sort of poetic Alastair Campbell. Dryden then committed a
sin equivalent to joining the Tories by converting to Roman Catholicism and
refusing to vow allegiance to King William III. He remains the only Poet
Laureate ever to get the sack.
That incident shows that Ogden Nash was wrong when he said “Poets aren't very
useful/ Because they aren't consumeful or very produceful”. Useful was
exactly what they were meant to be. The medieval English kings maintained a
retinue of versifiers and minstrels. Once the apostate Dryden had been
shuffled aside, his successor, Shadwell, began the tradition of writing
verses for court and national occasions. From his time onwards every royal
birthday, royal marriage and military victory was marked with a few obliging
lines of verse.
There wasn't a lot more scope for dissent once the politicians got involved
after 1790. William Pitt offered the job to Henry James Pye, who, although
not very well known as a politician, was even less well known as a poet. It
would be like offering the job now to Douglas Alexander.
It seemed once that whoever in the ranks of government supporters happened to
have the best writing style was more or less guaranteed the job - including
some spectacularly hopeless poets. Time and literary history have not been
kind to the work of Colley Cibber (1730-1757). The poems of Nahum Tate
(1692-1715) are justly neglected. The doggerel of Laurence Eusden
(1718-1730) gets more attention than it deserves. And Nicholas Rowe
(1715-1718) will be read long after Milton and Shakespeare are forgotten ...
but not until then.
The quality improved greatly in the 19th century. Robert Southey; William
Wordsworth; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; John Masefield; Sir John Betjeman and Ted
Hughes still have serious poetic reputations and none of them was a lackey
of the administration of his time.
Perhaps the best known of modern Laureates is Betjeman. As a determined
defender of traditional form, he was a more controversial poet than you
would gather from reading his verse now. But he was, without doubt, a public
poet - and that was at least in part because, as well as being a poet, he
was a television personality. He made documentaries, he had views on trains
and on architecture. He was a public intellectual. His published letters
show that Betjeman didn't find the job easy. But he made a success of it and
his success is a template for others to follow. If the new Laureate can
match Motion's private teaching and campaigning to Betjeman's role as a
public champion, she have done a fine thing.
The other thing she will have to do is write poetry. The real reason why
Larkin would have been a poor choice, apart from his dislike of cocktail
parties, was that he had stopped writing poetry by the time he was offered the
job in 1984. And, for all Andrew Motion's capacity as an advocate and an
administrator, the purpose of the job is to inspire us with the example of
the written word.
The point of poetry is to get a lot said quickly. Public poetry needs to get a
lot said about a topic that makes sense to most people and in terms that
they can comprehend. The challenge is to make poetry popular again.
And if the new Laureate wants to find inspiration, it is obvious where he or
she should look. The best poem ever written by a serving Laureate is
probably Tennyson's The Charge Of The Light Brigade. It was inspired by a
news report in The Times.
Poetry in (place of) Motion
Is the new Laureate in this list?
Simon Armitage
FROM HUDDERSFIELD; AGE 45
A Yorkshireman like Ted Hughes, and one on whom Hughes had a great influence.
Armitage is already a fine ambassador of poetry, and has recently published
a translation of the great Middle English classic Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight. Sean O'Brien called him “the first poet of serious artistic intent
since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity”.
Carol Ann Duffy
FROM GLASGOW; AGE 52
Her 1999 book The World's Wife - monologues from the point of view of the
wives of famous men (some fictional, some not) are revealing of her dry,
pointed take on the world. Rapture (Picador), published in 2005, was a
worthy winner of the T.S. Eliot prize: a painful delineation of the life and
death of a relationship. Long spoken of as a contender for the post.
Alice Oswald
FROM DEVON; AGE 42
Oswald is a gardener on the Dartington Estate in Devon, and her work often
draws from that landscape in the pastoral tradition of which Ted Hughes was
also a part. Her first book, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, published in
1996, marked her out as a force to be reckoned with, while her most recent
was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. Named as one of the Poetry Book
Society's “Next Generation” poets in 2004.
Benjamin Zephaniah
FROM BIRMINGHAM; AGE 50
Musician, dub poet and ambassador for the spoken word. His version of the
traditional Border ballad Tam Lyn was a highlight of The Imagined Village
tour last year. Read his new book, Too Black, Too Strong (Bloodaxe), which
addresses the issues facing black Britain - and all of us - in his
inimitable style.
Wendy Cope
FROM KENT; AGE 63
This national treasure takes a humorous view of things: she was awarded the
Michael Braude Award for Light Verse by the American Academy of Arts and
Letters in 1995. She would be bound to approach the position with some
irony: read Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (Faber & Faber) for a good
laugh at the high seriousness of the literati.
