Poet Prejudice

Perverse it is to deny the post of the poet laureate [Good Intentions, July], which began in England with the bard. Queen Victoria appointed William Wordsworth as poet laureate after he had retired to his garden. He refused. She then sent out the prime minister to persuade him, and during one of her galas, Wordsworth busted the seams of the borrowed attire he was ordered to wear. Lord Alfred Tennyson is known to have equally held the hearts of both the aristocracy and rising middle class. Soldiers requested copies of “Charge of the Light Brigade” in droves; Tennyson is buried with the British flag over his chest. His bust is within the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. Our national poets have been savvy in decimating their ideologies to the public. Robert Pinsky made a cameo on The Simpsons and CNN interviewed Billy Collins, which stunned me to see a poet on national TV.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse-novel Aurora Leigh accounts for the social exclusion of women to the post. Aurora’s husband Romney is at first disgusted at her will to be a poet. He catches her unaware playing in a garden as she crowns herself with ivy. She pretends she’s a caryatid elevating the role of the poet. The figuration of Aurora crowning herself on her birthday is a literary gesture to Madame de Stäell’s Corinne, or Italy as Corrine crowns herself at the capital. E.B. Browning was one of Tennyson’s competitors for the post. Aurora Leigh had to design her own laurel and post. Is this the only option for Minnesotan poets?

Toni Holland
Minneapolis