Michael Schmidt is the founder and editorial managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, the general editor of PN Review and Professor of Poetry and convener of the Creative Writing programme in the Department of English, University of Glasgow. He probably knows how to give a lecture. Aside from that he is a fine poet. His latest collection, The Resurrection of the Body, was published in 2006; and his Collected Poems were published by Doorstop earlier this year. He was an able judge of The Times poetry competition run in conjunction with Jodrell Bank in 2007; the winner, Joanna Clark, had her poem “bounced” off the Moon by the great radio telescope in Cheshire.

Michael Longley’s Collected Poems was published in 2006. In 2007, he was appointed Professor of Poetry for Ireland. He was born in Belfast in 1939 and was awarded Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2001. He is no stranger to the public arena; his Homeric poem, Ceasefire, was first published in the Irish Times on the September 3, 1994, soon after the announcement of the IRA ceasefire. After the publication, Longley said, “...I got a letter from the father of Paul Maxwell, the 16-year-old boy who had been blown up with Lord Mountbatten. Those letters matter more to me than any amount of criticism I might receive in literary journals or attention in the public world.”

Alice Oswald is a wonderful poet, though it’s hard to imagine her in a lecture hall. Her work, grounded in the English countryside, belongs in the line of poets which includes William Wordsworth and the late Ted Hughes. Born in 1996, she made her mark early with her tremendous first collection, The Thing In the Gap-Stone Stile, which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1996. She trained as a Classicist, and now words as a gardener on the Dartington Estate - practising what she preaches, so to speak. Her “poetic census” of the river Dart - called simply Dart and now available on a wonderful audio CD - won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. In a time when people have become disconnected from landscape and place, Oswald’s is a vital, necessary voice.

Benjamin Zephaniah has declared his unwillingness to stand for anything except bringing poetry to the people in his unique, energetic way. We should just be glad that he is among us.

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet of erudition, energy and wide scope; she is also a Classicist, teaching now at the University of Michigan.

Robert Bringhurst, also Canadian (though American by birth) is hardly known in this country, which is a shame; but his work - like the work of all the above - requires no Professorship to crown it.

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy