No 10 Turned Down Larkin, Auden for Poet Laureate
"Some of the greatest English poets of the 20th Century were ruled out by Downing Street as candidates for poet laureate, government files reveal. Names such as WH Auden, Philip Larkin and Robert Graves were passed over as being unsuitable. The job dates back to the 17th Century, and has been filled by some of the most celebrated poets in history, including Tennyson and Wordsworth. The papers, released on Wednesday, date from the 1960s to the 1980s."
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What Sparks Poetry:
Lloyd Wallace on Charles Simic's The World Doesn’t End
"It’s days like this that I get most upset that I will one day die. It’s also days like this I feel most fortunate to have a book like Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End to carry with me through my days—a book which, for all the violence it contains, all the liquid strangeness, all the pain, has always seemed to me to look at death with a steady, if somewhat smoky, optimism." |
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