Andrew Motion’s tenure as Poet Laureate is about to end, and the search for a successor has begun. It is accompanied with the usual tidal wave of claptrap about this not being ‘the sort of job which any real poet would want’ and the importance of not involving public opinion in the choice.
What is it about modern poets that they feel so threatened by the idea of public opinion? Ancient Greeks would have thought them barking. When in Homer’s Odyssey the pigman Eumaeus reported to Penelope the effect that the (disguised) Odysseus’s stories had on him, he says, ‘Sitting in my hut, he held me spellbound. It was like fixing my eyes on a minstrel who has been taught by the gods to sing words that bring delight to mortals, and everyone longs to hear him when he sings.’
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