I was standing outside the Editor’s office when I realised — in a blinding flash, call it a Damascene moment — one of the reasons I had been so troubled about the whole sorry affair of OxProfPo, as I have come to call it. You know, Derek Walcott, Ruth Padel, the sex-smear spats over who’d be the next Oxford Professor of Poetry. Come on, you must remember. It was only the beginning of this week.

Anyhow, the topic arose as a bunch of us stood in a gaggle waiting for a meeting to start; one of my colleagues remarked that he just couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. I mean, he said, isn’t that what the stuff is for? Poetry, he meant. Why else would you bother with poetry if it wasn’t to talk people into bed?

Now, I wouldn’t like it to be thought that I was, perish the thought, making light of a situation that has set back, it seems to me, both sexual equality and poetry several centuries. (Though, come to think of it, there are arguments to be made for setting poetry back several centuries: back then it really mattered. But that’s another column.) But my esteemed colleague has a point. “She is all states, and all princes I,/ Nothing else is./ Princes do but play us; compar’d to this,/ All honour’s mimic, all wealth, alchemy.” Yes, John Donne could have talked me into anything at all; I’d have fallen willingly. And Cyrano had only his words to work magic for him, or so he believed, hampered by the impediment of his great proboscis; we readers, however, fall for him straightaway, and need no beauty other than that of his language to convince us.

Here is Sappho, from many centuries ago (in a version by Josephine Balmer): “Some an army of horsemen, some an army on foot/ and some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest sight/ on this dark earth; but I say it is whatever you desire . . .” So it was for Helen, Sappho says, who spared no thought for her child or her parents, but sailed away to Troy. Sappho and Donne knew that love — or perhaps more properly, lust — knows neither rules nor boundaries, and won’t be kept in check even by the shriek of sexual harassment.

We have tried awfully hard to tame poetry. We have made Professors of Poetry and Poets Laureate; but none of these offices, really, has anything at all to do with poetry. Poetry comes from the deep part of ourselves that is connected to everything else, to the world, and that will not be tamed.

This does not mean that any behaviour at all is permissible in any circumstance; it means only that human relationships are complex and not easily codified. There is a Sioux text that runs: “They [the spirits? the animals? we cannot be sure] have gone away into the earth to hide. Nothing will coax them out again but the people dancing.”

True poetry is the voice that dances. It is found not only in books but everywhere, if you look closely enough. The kind of discussion that too often surrounds poetry does little more than silence the music that lets the dance begin.

And now for something completely different. I am delighted to see that Alice Munro has won the third Man Booker International Prize, which recognises a lifetime’s contribution to fiction. But Alice Munro writes (wonderful, perfect) short stories. Does this mean that the Man Booker Prize is about to start accepting collections of short fiction? Here’s hoping.

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