Spectator competition winners: averse to verse
For the latest challenge you were asked to come up with poems against poets or poetry. Plato started it, of course, but over the ages poetry has been accused of many sins: elitism, aestheticising horror, inadequacy as an agency of political change — to name a few. In what was a wide-ranging and spirited entry there were references to Shelley (‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’), and to Auden (‘poetry makes nothing happen’), and to much else besides. Commendations go to Nicholas Stone, Mae Scanlan, Brian Allgar and Nigel Stuart. The winners take £30, except Basil Ransome-Davies who snaffles £35. Basil Ransome-Davies There’s Chaucer the gofer, there’s ode-machine