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What Makes A Poet?

Posted on 20/06/2010 by admin

Having been to University and watched the rigmarole of the Chair of Poetry over the last year at Oxford University, I am reminded of how many ‘poets’ come out of Universities across the world. How college magazine publish them and how ‘movements’ are started by like-minds promoting each other enthusiastically for their entire careers. Most recent has been the Anglo-Saxon mob in the United Kingdom. For the most part if you are not prepared to join in with the mutual ego-massage of these people you are ignored. Actually if Ted Hughes is an example of a poet one is better off separated from them as he only used words as a therapy for his depression.

But Poets are not all born, some very worthy ones are highly intellectual and driven to the form because it is their only outlet. In the time of the great catholic/protestant wars in Europe to be a catholic in protestant countries and vice-versa left one without a vote or a voice. Alexander Pope solved that problem by writing stunning polemics in verse.

When you are at odds with accepted wisdom and accepted ways of doing things, people simply do not want to know you. In the UK the whole Poet Laureate debacle is about raining in the dissenting voices but making sure you have a trained voice to out-perform them. Betjeman was no poet. The closest he came was in Death In Leamington Spa.

Movements are a problem to the world of Poetry where individuality is a synonym for true talent.  The sooner English loses the Ezra Pound influence the sooner the real poets will be discovered.

And no I do not count myself amongst them at all.

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Children’s author, novelist, editor and poet.

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