Wole Soyinka Among Top Candidates for Oxford Professor of Poetry

The Guardian reports that Wole Soyinka is leading the pack of three for the highly coveted position as Oxford professor of poetry, "a 300-year-old elected post which is seen as the top academic poetry role in the UK." Alison Flood reminds us of the post's recent history: "The 2009 election saw the acclaimed poet Ruth Padel, the first woman to be elected, resign less than two weeks after securing the post. Her departure came after the revelation that she had alerted journalists to allegations of sexual harassment which had been made against her rival for the position, Nobel laureate Derek Walcott," and that the "eminent poet Geoffrey Hill was elected the following year ahead of nine other candidates."

Candidates need to be nominated by at least 50 Oxford graduates. Soyinka, who writes drama, novels and poetry, and who was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Nigeria during the 1967-1970 civil war, his poems smuggled out on toilet paper, received more than 90 nominations, including votes from writers Melvyn Bragg and Robert Macfarlane.

Soyinka won the Nobel in 1986 for his “wide cultural perspective [which] with poetic overtones fashions the drama of existence”. He will be competing for the Oxford post with Ian Gregson, a poet, literary critic and professor of creative writing at Bangor University who was backed by 54 graduates. In a provocative statement setting out his intentions if he were to be elected, Gregson said he wanted to “address the major issue facing contemporary poetry, which is, nonetheless, the one most shunned in the poetry world: how poetry has suffered, in recent decades, a catastrophic loss of cultural prestige and popularity”.

“Five hundred years, in which poetry and indeed the poet played a central role in the culture, are at an end. You could, now, be as talented but self-destructive as Dylan Thomas, or you could fight a corrosive but symptomatic gender battle like Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, but go unnoticed,” he writes, blaming the shift on the rise of popular culture – including television, which he says “shaped a crucial shift in which the visual took the upper hand over the verbal, and thus, the literary” – but most of all on new media.

Read all about it at The Guardian.