Poetry guardians reject modern verse

The Queen's English Society demands rhyme and metre in poems. But the group's targets, including the Laureate, have hit back

When Oscar Wilde argued that a 'poet can survive everything but a misprint' he had not foreseen the formation of the Queen's English Society.

Members of the group, set up to defend the 'beauty and precision' of the English language, have turned their attention to contemporary poetry and poets, arguing that too often strings of words are being labelled as poems despite the fact they have no rhyme or metre.

The campaigners say that there should be a new definition of poetry, outlining the characteristics needed before a piece of work can be called a poem.

'A lot of people high up in poetry circles look down on rhyme and metre and think it is old-fashioned,' said Bernard Lamb, president of the QES and an academic at Imperial College London. 'But what is the definition of poetry? I would say, if it doesn't have rhyme or metre, then it is not poetry, it is just prose. You can have prose that is full of imagery, but it is still prose.'

The campaign is being spearheaded by Michael George Gibson, who said it was 'disgraceful' that the Poetry Society had failed to respond properly to his demands for a definition. 'For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure and, second, alliteration and rhyme,' said Gibson. 'Word-things not made according to those principles are not poems.' True poems, he said, gave the reader or listener a 'special pleasure'.

Gibson praised the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Donne, Robert Graves and even Queen Elizabeth I, all of whom he thought followed the rules of poetry. But he was critical of current writers, including Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate. Gibson said that 'The Golden Rule', written by Motion to mark the Queen's 80th birthday, should not be called a poem. 'It has measure and refrain, but there is not another formal principle that would raise its status to that of a poem,' said Gibson.

He was also critical of the winners of The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition, arguing that none of them was a poem.

Gibson singled out the work of one of the competition's judges, Michael Schmidt, a contemporary poet and academic who had been awarded an OBE. Schmidt's piece 'Pangur Bàn' was not poetry, said Gibson. 'It is in pairs of lines and I will assume they are measured out in a formal way, but beyond that there is no other formal principle. It falls short of being a poem.'

The Poetry Society has responded to the criticisms. One trustee told Gibson: 'There is poetry in everything we say or do, and if something is presented to me as a poem by its creator, or by an observer, I accept that something as a poem.'

Ruth Padel, a prize-winning poet who used to be chair of trustees at The Poetry Society, added: 'As for "what poetry is": in The Use of Poetry TS Eliot said, "We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it."'

Motion described the 'rigidities' of the Queen's English Society as ridiculous. Schmidt, professor of poetry at the University of Glasgow, argued that for centuries poets had added variations to patterns and rules. 'It seems a primitive and even infantile notion that there are rules poetry must obey,' said Schmidt, who accused the QES of placing poetry in a 'straitjacket'. 'Poetry that follows the rules too closely is bad poetry. I think every form of verse, free or metrical, establishes a pattern and plays on variations of it.'

Schmidt said that Gibson's campaign was similar to a movement in the US that has been labelled 'new formalism'. Followers of the movement set up a magazine that included any poem as long as it 'rhymed and scanned'. 'But the bankruptcy of that has been recognised,' said Schmidt.

This is a poem ...

Excerpt from 'The Sun Rising' by John Donne, which members of the Queen's English Society labelled as a poem:

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late school-boys and sour prentices,

Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,


... but how about this?

Excerpt from 'Pangur Bàn' by Michael Schmidt, which members of the Queen's English Society said was not a true poem:

Jerome has his enormous dozy lion.

Myself, I have a cat, my Pangur Bàn.

What did Jerome feed up his lion with?

Always he's fat and fleecy, always sleeping

As if after a meal. Perhaps a Christian?

Perhaps a lamb, or a fish, or a loaf of bread.

His lion's always smiling, chin on paw,

What looks like purring rippling his face

And there on Jerome's escritoire by the quill and ink pot

The long black thorn he drew from the lion's paw.