‘Midas’ brood shall sit in Honour’s chair

To which the Muses’ sons are only heir.’

So went Marlowe’s mock-prophecy in ‘Hero and Leander’, foreseeing a day when all pretenders to the poetic title would be bloated lickspittles struggling for place. By such a rationale, the true artists would be ignored outcasts, haunters of darkened and bohemian walks. An intellectual Class War wore on forever more. Manning the barricades were the True Poets, raffish Marlowe, Pope the mad and bitter little ‘lasher’, the deranged killer Richard Savage and his eulogist Doctor Johnson, and every variety of wasting Romantic. Crossing the picket-line were all Laureates, Southey, Wordsworth and Tennyson in command, and any literary figure who accepted a knighthood or other state honours. Declining became declaiming; Benjamin Zephaniah’s rejection of an OBE on anti-imperialist grounds was like Larkin’s famous spurning of the Laureateship, though his attitude was purer: less rooted in principle and more in the thoroughly poetic sensibilities of distaste and boredom.
Oxford’s chair of poetry has not generally been regarded as cursed, or grubby, to the same extent as the national laureateship. This is perhaps peculiar, because it is after all directly elected rather than appointed by an elected leader. The process leading up to the Professor’s selection is under widespread scrutiny, and any degree-holder of the University is of course an elector. Each candidate will have a circle of supporters, and will to some degree display their credentials, sometimes in situations with all the political dignity of a JCR husting. Yet we, the public, trust the idea of a vaguely bookish Convocation so much more than we do any form of politician that this post is assumed to possess more integrity than the Laureateship, whose holder is expertly plucked out by the tarnished governmental machine. It should be recalled that Arcadian dons and their self-important graduate ex-pupils can be grubby as well. For example, the 1938 election of Adam Fox as Professor was generally regarded as sewn up by the clout of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis; Fox belonged to their Inkling clan.
By happy chance for hacks of all description, literary and Oxonian, this May was destined to see both poetic luminaries replaced, and by the same token both systems of poetic politics, Augustan patronage and Athenian democracy, put on trial. In an Oxford that has been bruised by internal governance arguments for a while, this was likely to produce an educative contrast anyway. Does Nanny know best? Will the Prime Minister’s Royal Prerogative and elite advice, or Convocation’s thrashed out debate, show the better intellectual taste? Mr. Brown & c., in one of their more astute recent decisions, set the standard for our University’s sense of competition high by appointing Carol Ann Duffy. Popular and canonical, Duffy always showed capacity to tease, chafing under humourless fiascos, like one exam board’s feeble, ad rappum argument that her poetry might fuel knife-crime. To get her across that picket-line was the right political decision, and it was not really the wrong poetic one. Simon Armitage, say, might be about as admired nationally, but the Barack vibe is not really with him. The gay community, the female sex and the Scots nation are a good deal more content than they would be with the headline ‘First Northern Poet Since The Last But One, And Before Him, Wordsworth’, and they are right to be. Obama was said to have introduced ‘poetry’ to politics; the nature of the Laureateship obviously makes it preferable that its choice can connote similar excitement.
Duffy represented her selection and consent as a victory for all woman poets. One of the women she stated was equally deserving of her Laureateship was Ruth Padel, who is one of the two likely winners of our chair of Poetry. Padel’s campaign website cites a blurb from Duffy in glowingly collective terms; the new Laureate (who is presented as such – the Padel party is up to date) claims to speak ‘in common with the community of poets in Britain’ through her endorsement. Perhaps she’s right; Oxford’s undergraduate Poetry Society gave Padel a vinous evening, a well-attended reading and an opportunity to distribute sign-up sheets both for graduate backers and undergraduate bag-carriers. But Duffy’s apostrophe to a ‘community of poets in Britain’ seems at worst similar to the Archbishop of Canterbury musing upon ‘the Church of England’ – a bit optimistic and ethereal. Would the great sociopaths, Marlowe, Savage, Blake and so on, really have relished membership of any such poets’ community, even with £5000 a year and travel expenses covered?
This is why I suspect that it will actually assist the cause of Derek Walcott that somebody is digging up stories about some past sexual depredations. The choice has become more distinguishable and the intellectual positions more clear; the ‘metropolitan favourite’, a duchess of the ‘poetic community’ ennobled by Queen Carol Ann, is now up against not only a Living Special Author (this is an English degree joke, for which I apologise), but a socially unnegotiable titan, the stuff of the Deptford tavern, of Lord Rochester’s stab in the dark. Professor Hermione Lee, in her incarnation as a Walcott heavy, got right onto this: ‘You might ask yourself as a student body whether you wanted Byron or Shelley as a professor of poetry, neither of whom personal lives were free of criticism.’
Sometimes, just before a dead, great writer is invoked in an essentially extra-textual context, the air seems to throb, as it must have done when Dr. Faustus summoned Mephistopheles. This was surely one such moment. The revenants of the second-generation Romantics, eerily youthful and beautiful, doubtless sprung up before Lee’s quailing vision.

Shelley: For what cause have you gathered our pure souls?
Do England’s children groan in slavery still?

Byron: Say rather, Hermione, my fairest, whether Sere Hellas cowers still ‘neath Turkish leather.

Professor Lee: Well, actually, er, Percy, George, it’s about the election for our Professor of Poetry. You see, Derek Walcott…

(The spirits vanish in a miffed and disappointed whirlwind. The Professor and Bowden of Cherwell exchange a glance of subdued relief.)

It’s hard to escape the suspicion that if the Cantabrigian Byron or the professionally awkward Shelley cared in the least about such a contest, they would be behind the newcomer, Arvind Mehrotra. His sudden arrival in the lists bears a memory of Byron’s Giaour in its drama:
The spur hath lanced his courser’s sides;
Away, away, for life he rides…
Besides, were Mr. Mehrotra Byron himself the Romanticism of his poetry would still be outdone by that of his beard. But onlookers of a more staid sort, such as the undergraduates who scurried to hear Christopher Ricks’s every address, may be starting to regret that poets, with their frenetic support bases and tabloid electioneering, are involved at all. Andrew Motion, thank heaven, thought the job was vague and the pay lousy. If all Grub Street followed suit, perhaps we would be treated to the more edifying spectacle of two or three affable dons chatting it out.

If you’ve ever watched The Devil Wears Prada, Ugly Betty, or flicked through a copy of a Condé Nast magazine, you’d be forgiven for assuming that plain and bookish Oxford is a million miles away from Vogue House. Well, having paid a quick visit there myself I’d argue that the two are more closely related then you might think. Like your college, Vogue House is grand and imposing from the outside and has an impressive foyer; but once you get into the offices it is rather more mundane. Like Oxford University, the world of Vogue is one outsiders associate with enormous prestige and glamour but is, in reality, manned by hard-working, ordinary people who are probably a bit fatigued. Vogue House and Oxford University even share some of the same characters. You’d be surprised by how many people you’d recognise: the kindly, elderly gentleman porter who knows everyone’s business, the boho-cum-sloaney young girls with back-brushed bed-hair and, most importantly, the accomplished, formidable and rather stern tutor. Who I am about to meet.
Alexandra Shulman is not impolite, by any standards, but she is brisk. Editor of Vogue for 17 years, working for so long at the head of the most profitable British magazine has taught Shulman that there is little time in the working day for idle chit-chat!
Shulman seems somewhat more skilled in avoiding controversy than her US counterpart Anna ‘Nuclear’ Wintour, but all the same many people see Vogue as promoting an aesthetic which is both impractical and inaccessible. I begin the interview by asking Alexandra what she feels the magazine is really for. ‘Well I have always thought that Vogue has to do with a vision of a world that actually does exist and is attainable. But it is the best end of it, really. It is the bit that deals with beauty, glamour, style: ‘fine living’. But I don’t think it is totally about money and about being rich, it’s about an attitude. And I think people like Vogue because they don’t buy it to look at their own lives, but to look at something that they might aspire to or might admire.’
Surely themes of aspiration and ‘fine living’ have had to be handled differently of late. Shulman recently said that she didn’t want people to find the magazine ‘offensive’, and I ask her to clarify: ‘I think in a recession what you have to be careful of is the fact that a lot of people are losing their jobs, and if you sound too glib about fashion and spending money, then that could be offensive to people who have found themselves suddenly with much less money and with real worries. But there is a limit to how far we can adapt – Vogue is what it is. A few issues ago we did our credit-crunch guide which was ‘40 Tips for Fabulous Frugality’. It was a bit tongue-in-cheek but with some really quite practical, good ideas.’
If anyone is qualified to pass judgement on which designer epitomises and leads the fashion of the noughties, it’s Alexandra, so I ask who the designer of our era is, expecting Miuccia Prada, or perhaps Marc Jacobs. ‘I think Miuccia Prada has been incredibly influential both in terms of her collections, but also in her vision of the growth of Prada brand. They have taken a small, expensive luggage company, and made it into a global fashion phenomenon. Their advertising is always looked at by everybody to see what they are doing, their stores are always incredibly confidently designed. And I have hardly ever seen a bad collection. But in terms of an individual designer, outside of the business and the brand, I think Nicholas Ghesquière from Balenciaga is pretty fantastic.’
It intrigues me that one person can look so fondly on both the work of both Balenciaga and Prada. The former whose collections have been rife with exotic fabrics, painfully sharply-tailored suits, armour-like dresses, gold robot leggings and general desirability and the latter whose looks have featured awkward, top-heavy silhouettes, dirty colours, tweed, strange pixie-hats and a refusal to make women into sex-symbols (or, at least, not in a traditional way). But it seems that variety is paramount to Alexandra’s vision of the magazine: ‘I have personal taste in fashion photography but I really don’t impose that on the magazine. I have deliberately got fashion editors with different styles, and we work with different photographers so that we are a broad canvas unlike, for instance, American Vogue or French Vogue, which are much more consistent in the way they present their fashion. I mean, all of those shoots could have been by the same person because it is so very clear what each magazine’s vision is. I like to think you can look at a Tim Walker shoot in British Vogue or look at a Nick Knight shoot and they’re completely different.’
This talk about the identity of UK Vogue makes me wonder what Shulman considers her greatest achievements in her time there. She responds modestly, only crediting herself in relation to other, more well-known talents: ‘I think I’ve been successful at working with the team that I work with. I backed Mario Testino relatively early on, in fact, before he was shooting for any other big magazines. I discovered Nigella Lawson as a food writer so I was quite pleased by that – that took off! The thing I would most like people to think about Vogues I have edited is that when you look at them they do have some feeling of the times, that they do reflect the times. And I think in the main they do. When I look back I often think ‘Well actually, yeah, we did have something about whatever it was that was going on’. If you’re going to write about grunge you would want to look at Vogue because you can see the way that art was changing and fashion was changing.’
Sat at Shulman’s desk, the interview isn’t rushed, the phone isn’t ringing off the hook, nobody outside in the bigger office seems all that crazed. I ask how frantic Shulman’s working life really is: ‘Well you can see it looks quite calm and normal in here, really. It depends, sometimes it is intensely busy. There are phases of the year when I know what I am doing every half-hour for the next four weeks and then there are periods when it is much slower and much more normal.’ Although she only uses Facebook for a very healthy ‘five minutes every three days’, it would seem that Shulman has enough time for life’s smaller pleasures. I ask what music she’s listening to: ‘Well I’m currently obsessed with Spotify. It’s some online thing, to download, and you go into it and you can type in…I was going to say Lady Gaga but it is interesting to do somebody older. Type in David Bowie, say, and every single version of everything he has ever done is on there that you can listen to, you can’t buy it but you can listen to it. I like kind of recherché cover versions of old Dylan songs and things like that. So it is perfect to play around on. But I haven’t bought any really new music recently. I kind of like those Indie people like Fleet Foxes. I like soppy Indie music, mainly!’
As I say, working at Condé Nast seems just like working as an Oxford student, but with more money and less Relentless/Red Bull-dependency. So if you’re the sort that doesn’t want to uproot from the Oxford lifestyle, entirely, and you quite like the sound of Vogue House, fear not – I have sought advice on your behalf. ‘You’ve got to be quite persistent now. I don’t think you can just waltz in and be lovely. I think you’ve really got to use your intelligence, find the right person to get in touch with, put together a good CV. Its not just about how much amazing work experience you’ve got, but also you have to sound like you’re on the ball; don’t make spelling mistakes, things like that. Always write something that indicates why you specifically want to do this thing, because as soon as you think you’ve got a round-robin letter, you’re not interested.’
And then? ‘Once you’ve got in to do work experience or something, being really willing and organised goes a very long way, whether you’re working in the fashion room, beauty room or my office. We really notice that – people who just come in and say ‘I’m not doing anything – is there anything I can do to help?’ and in the main most people that have come here and been good at work experience have, I’ve noticed, ended up with jobs.’

Etcetera talk to Richard O’Brien and some of the poets who are featuring in Brasenose’s arts festival during third week, providing samples of their poetry and discussing the inspiration behind them.