Spectator competition winners: averse to verse

For the latest challenge you were asked to come up with poems against poets or poetry. Plato started it, of course, but over the ages poetry has been accused of many sins: elitism, aestheticising horror, inadequacy as an agency of political change — to name a few. In what was a wide-ranging and spirited entry there were references to Shelley (‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’), and to Auden (‘poetry makes nothing happen’), and to much else besides. Commendations go to Nicholas Stone, Mae Scanlan, Brian Allgar and Nigel Stuart. The winners take £30, except Basil Ransome-Davies who snaffles £35.

Basil Ransome-Davies There’s Chaucer the gofer, there’s ode-machine Hood, There’s Herbert the God-bothered parson. There’s Shakespeare the aspirant. They’re only good For wiping a metrophobe’s arse on.

There’s Whitman the mystagogue, out of his tree, There’s Tennyson, bearded and smelly. There’s Dowson the dipso, and Cummings the twee. They give me an ache in my belly.

Pound’s Cantos are voodoo, they chargrill your brain, While Stevens amounts to a riddle And Ginsberg the Windbag leaks verse like a drain.