Poetry & Politics

The poetry chair at Oxford University was established in 1696 by a barrister who thought that "standards of learning" were in a decline, but for years the chair moldered. Except for Matthew Arnold, the occupants were seldom poets. Though it was Oxford's only elective professorship, the eligible voters (all Masters of Arts) were usually so preoccupied with such rites as translating the motets of pre-Bach polyphonists that they failed to vote.

Last week all that changed in a donybrook fought, in the words of Poet Louis MacNeice, with "the soft-spoken malice, the ostentatiously throwaway display of inside information, the heavy-lidded, thin-lipped irony, the addiction to verbal arabesques, the exquisite verdigris of cynicism, that have traditionally characterized this city of sneering spires."

Kingmaker . . . Making the election a battle was the idea of a tempestuous female kingmaker: Enid Starkie, Fellow of Somerville College, a brilliant Rimbaud scholar who pub-crawls about Oxford in bright red slacks and beret while smoking cigars. In 1951 she proposed that the chair actually be occupied by a poet. Her candidate: Poet C. Day Lewis. At once, her archrival, tweedy Helen Gardner, Fellow of St. Hilda's College, now famed as an oddly prim defender of Lady Chatterley's Lover, entered Novelist (The Screwtape Letters) C. S. Lewis. In the ensuing battle of Lewis v. Lewis, Starkie's man won the five-year post (which pays $840 a year), and in 1956 she was successful in putting across Poet W. H. Auden.

This year 123 sponsors put up a formidable candidate: protean Poet-Novelist Robert Graves, who lives on Majorca with his family, two poodles, a passel of cats and a donkey. He promised to lecture "about poetry" because "at universities they don't know anything about it." Kingmaker Starkie got herself nominated, and Rival Gardner quickly followed suit. Oxonian purists then went to the desperate length of putting up Cambridge University's frosty Critic F. R. Leavis, the scholarly exponent of Novelist D. H. Lawrence.

. . . But Not King. Soon tongues were wagging over the sherry: "A vote for Leavis is a vote for Lawrence ... A vote for Starkie is a vote for Rimbaud ... A vote for Gardner is a vote for Chatterley ... A vote for Graves is a vote for Graves." Candidate Starkie crowed happily that Oxford "is the most spiteful place I've ever been in," and made her point by scoffing at her rivals.

Last week, in solemn ritual, a record 658 berobed M.A.s padded into Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre and presented ballots in Latin for the now hotly desired chair of professor artis poeticae. The winner: Robertum R. Graves, with 329 votes. Enid Starkie finished last with 96 votes, a bitter reminder that kingmakers never become kings. Hearing the news in Madrid, Winner Graves composed a victory communique in three minutes flat:

Experts ranked in serried rows

Fill the enormous plaza full

But only one is there who knows

And he's the man who fights the bull.

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