What exactly is the point of the Oxford Professor of Poetry? And will Wole win it?

‘People are terribly interested in the election,’ said Christopher Ricks before his 2004 inaugural lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, ‘but then not terribly interested in the lecture, which I’m afraid is life.’ This year even the election campaign has been quite subdued. There has been no anonymous smear campaign as in 2009, no wildcard candidate like Stephen Moss in 2010 (‘Yes we scan!’), and only one, very tame, squabble after Melvyn Bragg switched his support from Wole Soyinka to Simon Armitage.

There remains an awkward question about whether the Professorship election deserves all the fuss. The same question applies to the poet laureateship, and it relates to what Ian Gregson – one of the candidates – calls ‘the major issue facing contemporary poetry, which is, nonetheless, the one most shunned in the poetry world: how poetry has suffered, in recent decades, a catastrophic loss of cultural prestige and popularity.’ Gregson says he will dedicate his tenure to addressing that issue.