I've had a look at Soyinka's poems. They are not the sort of thing I care for. Free and formless. I assume his plays are better. They are the root of his fame, are they not?

Yes, John, he does.

You can read some here http://www.shigeku.org/xlib/lingshid...en/soyinka.htm

I've seen them, as you see. Bernard Shaw wrote poems too. And Arthur Miller. Not much good.

Recent professors were Auden, Graves Heaney and Fenton. There is no-one here of that stature but Alicia surely comes nearest.

I would have sworn you asked if Soyinka wrote poetry and that is what I replied to. Did you wave your magic wand?

John:

I think it fair to say that "the sort of thing I care for" is not an especially capacious category in your case.

I'd be very pleased, though, to see a talented formal poet in the job.
And I've had confirmation from the University that I can vote, so I shall.

Well, I did my best by contacting my sister-in-law, who spends time at Oxford every summer reading at the Bodleian (not that I'm envious). Unfortunately, she didn't know a single Oxford graduate. At least that was her story.

For those who haven't seen it (it's on Alicia's Facebook campaign page), here's an endorsement of her by a former Professor of Poetry and fine critic, Christopher Ricks:

"The poems of A.E.Stallings are never less than the true voice of feeling, and always more. For one thing, they contain many feelings and many voices (including those of poets who have gone but who are here still in her translations, among them Lucretius and Hesiod). Moreover, there are energies other than those of feeling. The mind of Europe: it is a phrase that two of Stallings’s favourite poets, A.E.Housman and T.S.Eliot, happily wielded. A classicist as was Housman, an American as Eliot once was, at home in and with the Mediterranean, she is able to realize in her poems the myriad minds of Europe.
“For a Professor of Poetry I believe that I should choose an American”: T.S.Eliot in 1922. He spoke three times, in the one sentence, of “first-rate men” (my italics). In the mind of Eliot’s candidate, Irving Babbitt, “the classical culture is active” (his italics). And so it now is in the mind and art of this first-rate woman.
“It is not to the interest of English literature that the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford should pass to the servile, the indefinite, or the sluggish”. Eliot again. Well, that will certainly not happen in the present election. Among the candidates is Alicia Stallings, who is independent, definite, and energetic, as poet-translator, as teacher, and as open-minded and open-hearted friend to the art and craft of poetry."

Christopher Ricks. A true paragon of virtue and ethics. A shining example of poetic integrity. The very model of modern rectitude and righteousness.

Will someone please slap me before I say something unseemly?

(ouch)

Thank you!

Best,

Bill

All I know about Ricks is he wrote a good book about Bob Dylan, the only person I might vote for instead of Alicia if he were running (and if I were eligible to vote).