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 two years in which the person appointed would be required to "engage in activities to promote and encourage poetry within the State and shall give no fewer than two public readings within the State each year." Poet Gerald Stern (born 1925), from Lawrenceville, New Jersey, was appointed as the state's first poet laureate by Governor Christine Todd Whitman on April 17, 2000. At the time of his appointment, Stern had been the author of twelve books of poetry and won the National Book Award for his 1998 collection "This Time: New and Selected Poems". Stern had been a finalist for