Isn't it time the British media stopped using Ruth Padel as a whipping post? The latest installment was Sunday's column in the Sunday Times , by Daisy Goodwin , which basically argues that children (including her daughter) should not be encouraged to become professional poets, because it is a vocation that cannot really be taught, and that is best practiced by people in banks or offices like Eliot or Stevens , not creative writing profs, as work provides the humanity that drives inspiration; amateur poetry is the thing. Her main example of the poet gone wrong is Padel, who is described more than once as "ambitious" for quitting her academic teaching post at the age of 44 to concentrate on writing poetry. The article is really ludicrous, and ill-informed, and, more to the point, badly damaging, I think, to poetry. I am beginning to recognise that the main enemy of British poetry is the British media - their ideas of what poetry is, or should be, are rather quaintly V...
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