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 Washington by state senator Ken Jacobsen to create the office. Jacobsen's original proposal called for the poet laureate to be paid with a firkin of beer annually, however, the act as finally adopted simply specifies that the poet laureate "shall receive compensation at a level determined by the [Washington Arts] commission". From 2009 to 2011 the office of poet laureate was vacant due to a paucity of state funds. In 2016 Gonzaga University professor Tod Marshall was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate of Washington. Marshall's major initiative during his term is Washington 129, an anthology of 129 poems gathered from Washingtonians