BAD ASS TERZA RIMA

SPEAKING ABOUT D. H. LAWRENCE, Malcolm Muggeridge reportedly said that he was a “bum poet and a bum person”. Without actually hearing the stress behind Muggeridge’s words it is difficult to know whether the great man thought that the famous plagiarist Lawrence was “bum” as in “no good”, or someone interested in “bums”, whether these were vagabonds or derrières of females, or even males. Although Lawrence’s work is generally remarkably dull even by the hideously low standards of End-of-Empire English literature, particularly his turgid poetry, I would like to hope that Muggeridge meant the latter, and that Lawrence was a bum man.

THIS IS, OF COURSE, BECAUSE one expects one’s poets to be interested in sex, to have sex and to write about it. Otherwise we are reduced to pantheistic drivel about animals and plants, and one can see enough of that on BBC2.

SO IT IS WITH SOME PUZZLEMENT that I have been reading about the enforced resignation of Ruth Padel, the latest occupier of the joke position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. According to The Guardian, animal-lover Padel, perhaps not the first poet to spring to one’s mind or come to one’s lips when one thinks about modern poets, “displays a bewildering variety of stanza forms: terza rima, quatrains, syllabics, alexandrines, free verse and some marvellous sonnets”. And also can write some rather cruel e-mails bad-mouthing rivals and accusing them of sexual harassment in order to get them to drop out of her way in her election to the Oxford post.

ANY MAN WHO HAS TAUGHT POETRY to young girls, as I have done, knows that sooner or later this will end up in hanky-panky, if not just hanky, and to accuse a good poet of feeling up a lady’s bum when no one is looking is about as mean and pointless as blaming the cat for lapping up the cream.