Spectator competition winners: surreptitious sonnets

In Competition No. 3264, you were invited to submit a poem in response to the following journal entry by Wallace Stevens on 3 August 1906: ‘Engaged at the office all day on a sonnet – surreptitiously.’

For much of his life, the Pulitzer prize-winning Stevens was a vice-president at one of America’s leading insurance companies. He jotted down ideas for poems as he walked the two miles between his home and office in downtown Hartford – and evidently continued to work on them once he got there. But his efforts at surreptitiousness paid off. David Shields drew my attention to a remark by a colleague who expressed astonishment at learning of Stevens’s extracurricular activities: ‘Write poetry! Who, Wally?’

Entrants drew inspiration from Barrett Browning, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and Larkin, among others. Commiserations go to a long list of unlucky losers: D.A. Prince, Mike Morrison, Bill Greenwell, Hugh King, Nicholas Lee, Janine Beacham, Katie Mallett, Frank Upton and Dorothy Pope, take a bow.