Spectator competition winners: poems about literary feuds

In Competition No. 3238, you were invited to submit a poem about a literary feud.

Wallace Stevens’s 1936 fisticuffs with Ernest Hemingway cropped up several times in what was a modestly sized but entertaining entry. The insurance executive-poet broke his hand, in two places, in the course of an unedifying punch-up in Key West (‘Stevens hit me flush on the jaw with his Sunday punch bam like that…’).

Norman Mailer headbutting Gore Vidal backstage at the Dick Cavett talk show also loomed large, but it was a war of words between two female writers that caught the imagination of Sylvia Fairley. She heads the winning line-up below with a verse account of the spat between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy that inspired Nora Ephron’s 2002 play Imaginary Friends.

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Mary McCarthy unleashed the blind rage of Lillian Hellman, whose writing she stated was riddled with lying on every page, and stuck in the past; grossly overrated.