Recently - in the process of organizing the poet Laura Ulewicz's archive - I found a Roderick Macleish piece for the Herald Tribune News Service on the 1966 election for the Oxford University "Professor of Poetry". I don't know if these elections - and I wonder how much I actually ought to care! - have always been Vaudeville. But this one makes for pretty funny reading. This time the contest was between Robert Lowell (a man whose current legacy as a poet is much dimished and Edumund Blunden (who was he??). But here goes this version the election that seems always made into something of a spectacle, no matter its consquence to whatever might be our own worlds of Poetry:
Britain has gone giddy with elections, but for academicians, unwashed scrivners in attics and an obscure British even whose origins, like the wall game and Morris dancing, are lost in the common rooms of tradition. This professorship only pays $500 a year for five years to a term. It requires no residence at Oxford, occasional lectures and the professor doesn't even have to be a poet.
The current one is Robert Graves - and so are
the two candidates in next week's election:Robert Lowell of the United States and Edmund Blunden of Britain.
O, the excitement is grand at Oxford! Dr. Enid Starkie, a fiery and joyous lady who is reader in French Literature at the University, has been getting great lists of sponsors for Blunden. London's bookies are making book --favoring Lowell--and the American Embasy is turning itself inside out trying to appear unconcerned and univolved. (Nobody's accused the CIA of getting mixed up in the Election-- yet.)
And there's controversey. For instance, C. Day Lewis, who was, himself, Oxford Professor of Poetry one time, came out in support of Lowell. Then he discovered Blunden was Lowell's opponent. It just so happens that Blunden graciously stepped aside and refused to stand against Lewis and Lewis did not want to appear ungrateful, but on the other hand he didn't want to disavow Lowell...ete., etc.
Then, too, there is the state of modern British
poetry--rather torpid and conservative despite the presence of fine neo-classical writers like Philip Larkin on the poetic horizon, the main influence in this rather still pond have been Americans with Lowell the leading influence. his collection "Life Studies" was a major event when it was published here in 1959. The status of American poetry in Britain was further enhanced by the late Sylvia Plath, a brilliant young writer who died a few years ago after practicing her craft in Britain.
Lowell has his passionate advocates here. One critic calls him, "..an extraordinary mixture; an aristocrat and a man of learing who also possesses a peculiarly American spontanaiety and nakedness..." It's the mixture in Lowell himself that appeals almost as much as his verse--scion of a great Boston family, Roman Catholic, Conscientious Objector and a master of what this same critic calls "Confessional Poetry."
But Blunden has Enid Starkie. She is a real attention-getter -- the first requisite of campaign managers. She is passionate about the color red-- red typewriters, red room, red skirts--and about everything French to the degree that she hops around Oxford wearing a French sailor's hat.She was originally for Lowell. Then she came to the conclusion that Blunden , who is 69, might not get another crack at the professorship. (A few weeks ago he was thinking of quitting and Starkie swarmed all over him, putting a short order stop to that nonsense.) "If Lowell gets beaten," she says, "My campaign in 1971 will be for him. My only regret is that I will have to wait five more years. It would be so much more fine if it were only three."
The real prize is prestige. Along with Lewis and Graves, W.H. Auden has also held the chair. Lowell is already ahead in the prestige department - although his campaign manager, Sir Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadhan College, Oxford, is not just in same league as Starkie. Despite what the Bookies say, thos who test the fusty air of Oxford's cloisters claim it could go either way.
All of Oxford's ambulatory M.A.'s are eligible to vote.
The Oxford Professorship of Poetry ought to tide the British over until the General Election...
So there you have it, a little history from an archive.
Stephen Vincent
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
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