Poet laureate the honour that no formal effusions from him should be required. Due to his age, he became the only laureate to write no official poetry. Tennyson was generally happy in his numerous poems of this class. On Tennyson's death there was a considerable feeling that there was no acceptable successor. William Morris and Swinburne were hardly suitable as court poets. Eventually the undesirability of breaking the tradition for temporary reasons, and severing the one official link between literature and the state, prevailed over the protests against allowing someone of inferior genius to follow Tennyson. Abolition was similarly advocated when Warton
Poet Laureate of New Jersey to the position of Poet laureate in other American states and in several other countries. However, a public reading in September 2002 by the state's second laureate, Newark-based poet Amiri Baraka of his poem "Somebody Blew Up America" was met with harsh criticism by the public and news media. The poem which explores terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 was considered to be violent, incendiary and anti-Semitic, and the ensuing controversy ignited a political firestorm. Because of Baraka's defiant refusals to apologize or resign as poet laureate and that there was no mechanism within the law to remove him, the