The Best Poetry Jury Ever?

A small item in the NB column in the TLS (June 16 2006) has caught Eyewear's eye.

In 1980, Andrew Motion won the Arvon International Poetry Competition. The four-poet judging panel? Ted Hughes, Charles Causley, Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin.

It seems impossible to imagine a much more impressive panel, for the second half of the 20th century, although another possible dream ticket (with the understanding that all poets needed to be contemporaneous and alive) could have been, say, in the early 1950s, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost.

Or, for that matter, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop and W.S. Graham.

Such a panel today, to have such striking heft would still include Seamus Heaney, but also Andrew Motion. Who might the other two be?

Such trivial games mean almost nothing, but sometimes Eyewear plays them anyway.

Comments

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