The welcome appointment of Carol Ann Duffy to the office of poet laureate (not to mention the controversy surrounding the appointment of the Oxford poetry professor) has had the added attraction of propelling poetry out of those cloistered areas of newspapers where it usually lurks and on to the main news pages.
Some past incumbents of Duffy's office have been disinterred and surveyed. The Daily Telegraph even published a letter defending perhaps the most vilified of laureates, Alfred Austin, exonerating him from having written the lines on the illness of Edward VII: "Across the wires the electric message came / He is no better, he is much the same"; and, on the Jameson Raid: "They went across the veldt, As hard as they could pelt" – the work, it correctly said, of parodists.
But charity ought not to be taken too far. He may not have perpetrated those specific offences, but he did write much in the vein of: "Then I fling the fisherman's flaccid corpse / At the feet of the fisherman's wife"; and "Love, though an egotist, can deify / A vulgar fault, and drape the gross with grace" – which suggest that he had cloth ears.
The quality that got him the job was his fidelity to Conservative principles. The Marquis of Salisbury, as prime minister, was rewarding him for the many supportive leaders he had written in a newspaper called the Standard. Yet the duffers in this progression have not had a monopoly: even the better laureates have from time to time written clunkingly awful verse.
In The Stuffed Owl, their wonderful anthology of bad verse, DB Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee accommodated not only Shadwell, Tate, Cibber, Warton and Austin – all from the bottom end of the laureate league – but also woeful contributions from Dryden, Southey, Wordsworth and Tennyson, all of whom were poets laureate, as well as Browning, Burns, Byron and Keats, who weren't.
The Stuffed Owl was first published in 1930. An augmented version appeared in 1943; my edition was issued 20 years later. I have yet to come across the version published in the US in 2003, but I gather the cast list is much where 1943 left it. This seems unjust when you consider the vast amounts of bad verse flowing under the bridges in the subsequent 66 years.
Even his utmost defenders would surely accept that John Betjeman, poet laureate 1972-84, ought to have a place in this pantheon. Still, like all forms of art, this one is infected by fashion; one generation's fine verse may find itself on the next generation's reject pile, and vice versa. When Wordsworth died in 1850, Macaulay told Matthew Arnold that less money had been collected all over the land for a memorial than could have been mustered in Cambridge alone 10 years earlier. This had nothing to do with Wordsworth's acceptance of the office of laureate. He wrote no bad verse in his role as poet laureate, since he wrote no verse at all; the only work to issue from him, a celebration of the installation of Prince Albert as chancellor of Cambridge University, was written for him by his son-in-law.
That Arnold and Macaulay should have had their chat about Wordsworth is perhaps a trifle surprising, since Arnold could not abide the poetry or prose of Macaulay. Macaulay was a fearsome critic of verse, targeting most of all a then popular practitioner called Robert Montgomery, of whose lines – "The soul, aspiring, pants its source to mount, / As streams meander level with their fount" – he said: "On the whole, the worst similitude in the world." But Arnold, hardly less brutally, said that anyone who could read Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome without detecting the ring of false metal betrayed his unfitness to make any kind of judgment on poetry.
Long may such disputations continue. The next excitement in this department of life is not due until 2014, when Sir Peter Maxwell Davies is due to give up the mastership of the queen's music, an office occupied by even more duds in its day than the laureateship. By that time the horrible present-day fashion for employing the word music to mean only rock and pop may have reached a point where those who make that decision will limit their trawl to that end of the market only. In which case, I think I know where I ought to be putting my money; on one of the recent crop of feisty, headline-grabbing chanteuses. One of these, I see, is called Duffy.
