This week's announcement of the withdrawal of Derek Walcott from the race to become the new Oxford professor of poetry due to the controversial allegations of sexual impropriety made against him has indelibly maculated the contest. Ruth Padel, Walcott's chief rival for the post, is now up against the Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, amid calls for tomorrow's elections to be suspended. The saga opens up an old, yet still necessary, debate.

Not only was Walcott in my opinion the better poet (his magnum opus Omeros, a post-colonial take on the Homeric canon, is a coruscating work of rare beauty and is arguably genius), and a Nobel prize winner to boot, but also the undoubted symbolism of an elite cultural bastion like Oxford, an institution solely dedicated to the life of the mind, electing Walcott in the same year as America elected Obama would have been both too potent and too serendipitous to ignore. The long overdue acknowledgement of intellectual equality craved by black people would have been admirably served by Walcott's appointment to one of the most prestigious posts in the world of academia.

But moreover, let us remember the literary precedents. Poets have never been synonymous with virtue, even if poetry itself has long inhabited the highest echelons of human thought. The poetic pantheon is littered with great verse produced by less than great men and women. As such, this election is a clarion call for all those still cherishing the Romantic delusion of poets as effete wordsmiths, courting the muse beneath starry midnight skies. Let's be honest. Poets tend not to be demure milquetoasts. Au contraire, they tend to be people of sublime passion, and often vice. They save the virtue for the written page.

Catullus, Villon, Byron, Baudelaire, first-rate poets , all led salacious and intemperate lives marred by tragic flaws. In fact, a craving for temporary opiates or a lubricious disposition are almost a sine qua non of the role. As Willy Loman once said, it comes with the territory. Be it the absinthe bottle, syphilitic prostitutes or even murder, poets have not just long frequented, but actively bathed in the demi-monde, and are accustomed to the moral twilight.

Not that I am for one minute condoning Walcott's alleged behaviour, but merely separating art from life. The dichotomy here is vital. The classical notion of seeing the arts as essentially distinct from the vita – as seeing them as wholly separate entities – is paramount when thinking judiciously about literature, and poetry in particular.

So why should it have been any different with Walcott? If he were to have won, he would have been appointed to a professorship of poetry, not virtue. Despite what we may wish to the contrary, the overwhelming evidence of history demonstrates that most great art emerges from the crucible of tormented souls and licentious living. The lofty peaks of Mount Parnassus are seldom scaled by the prudish, the boring or the virtuous, but by the passionate. Long may it thus continue.