Spectator competition winners: Shakespeare lays down the law

In Competition No. 3170, a challenge inspired by Shelley’s assertion that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, you were invited to step into the shoes of a well-known poet and write their own law in verse.

The above quotation is from Shelley’s 1821 essay A Defence of Poetry, written in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s The Four Ages of Poetry. But my favourite lines on the social function of poetry come from Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue: ‘In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil — no lyric has ever stopped a tank. In another sense it is unlimited.’

This assignment was a crowd-pleaser, attracting submissions that combined wit with technical adroitness. There were so many entries of merit that it was a tricky one to judge. Commendations go to Alan Millard, Max Ross, Bill Greenwell, Richard Spencer, Chris O’Carroll, Frank McDonald and John Priestland.