What's a heaven for?

In last week's TLS, Peter McDonald has a column urging the case for Geoffrey Hill as candidate for the recently vacated Poetry Chair. Hill's learning and wit would make him a splendid academic choice.

McDonald insists that the holders of the Poetry Chair

are not there to proselytize (sic) for poetry, or indeed for themselves as poets, but to try to say things that matter about the art itself.

"Reaching out" is not required; but reaching within certainly is.

Nice turn of phrase there. Reaching within: a leading poet telling us how poems are made, where they come from in the tradition, how they make new myths, how they form neural networks of the imagination. Paul Muldoon's The End of the Poem was a tour de force. That's the sort of energy and erudition we require from our professors.

The duties of the Professor are to give one public lecture each term; to give the Creweian Oration at Encaenia every other year (since 1972 in English); each year to be one of the judges for the Newdigate Prize, the Lord Alfred Douglas Prize and the Chancellor's English Essay Prize; every third year to help judge the Prize for the English Poem on a Sacred Subject, and generally to encourage the art of poetry in the University.

Generally to encourage the art of poetry in the University. That seems pretty wide open to interpretation. It could mean encouraging the best to write better, or encouraging neophytes to start reading and writing.

Let's say it was the Chair of Tennis. There would be those saying the job would be to encourage the future Wimbledon champions. Others might suggest it could entail encouraging those who'd never done so much as pick up a racquet to start enjoying the challenge and exercise, the company of like-minded people. Isn't it possible to do both? He is quite right to dismiss self-promotion as a role of the Chair, but in rejecting proselytising for poetry itself Mcdonald assumes that the audience for poetry is rightly self-selecting. I'd like to hear more from him about how he sees that sensibility developing in young people.

Eh, forget all that and read Christopher Reid's review of Ian Hamilton's Collected Poems.