Simon Armitage is a fitting choice for Poet Laureate
The news that Simon Armitage has been appointed the new Poet Laureate, the twenty-first in England’s history, is both profoundly welcome and somewhat unexpected. Since Armitage published his first collection of poetry Zoom! in 1989, he has established himself as perhaps the country’s foremost national poet, turning his hand with assurance to work as diverse as the definitive modern translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a libretto for the 2006 opera The Assassin Tree and many well-received works of non-fiction, such as his account of a walk along the Pennine Way, Walking Home.
Not since Philip Larkin has a modern poet managed to combine robust accessibility with intellectual assurance, and Armitage’s healthy sales of his books must, one imagines, make his less commercially successful peers look on enviously. (He admitted in one recent interview that he would make a decent living purely from sales of his poetry alone: an unheard-of situation in an era when it is a publishing truism that people do not buy works of modern verse.)
Yet, unlike Larkin’s morose misanthropy, Armitage presents himself as an accessible and public figure. A look at his forthcoming and recent appearances shows him appearing all over England for “an evening with Simon Armitage”. Some of these places are where one might expect – the Hay Festival, Port Eliot – and others are more down-to-earth. Visitors to the Square Chapel Arts Centre in Halifax, the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead and the Print Room at the Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill will all have a chance to see our new Poet Laureate speak later this year.
Appearing in public is undoubtedly something that he takes seriously. On 22 May, for instance, he is talking at the Bath Festival in the afternoon before attending the premiere of a new puppet opera based on Hansel and Gretel in the evening. Armitage has long been a mainstay of the GCSE English syllabus, enabling many of his readers to feel that they have grown up with his poetry. One journalist wrote, after his appointment, that his English class was addressed by Armitage and was discussing why he had chosen not to title one of his poems. Their teacher had expressed the significance of such a choice, but when Armitage was asked for his reason, he simply shrugged and said “I couldn’t be arsed.”
He inherits a Laureateship that has risen and fallen in stature with the past few incumbents. John Betjeman, the second choice after Larkin, found it hard to produce work to order, although, like Armitage, his substantial fame (assisted by now-inconceivable appearances on primetime chat shows) meant that his writing found a wide and appreciative audience. His successor Ted Hughes suffered from being Laureate at an especially grim time for the monarchy, and he was criticised in some quarters for what seemed like an atypical deference to English institutions.
He was, however, considerably more distinguished than his successor Andrew Motion, who produced some of the poorest public verse that a well-respected writer has ever published. Especial ignominy must go to the “rap” that he produced for Prince William’s 21st birthday, which begins “Better stand back, here’s an age attack, but the second in line, is dealing with it fine.” It was left to Carol Anne Duffy to bring some dignity to the post; the first woman to be appointed to the Laureateship, she described it as a “joy” and was unafraid to use her position for political purposes, writing scathing attacks on the “thatch-fraud” Donald Trump and the “buttock-faced smarm” of Brexiteers.
Armitage’s appointment, then, should be seen a perfect fit of poet and position. Unfortunately, there has been some controversy that can best be summarised by the public-school educated BBC arts correspondent Will Gompertz asking the former probation officer and comprehensive schoolboy Armitage: “Did it cross your mind, even for a moment, when you were offered the post to say, “You know, actually, I don’t think this is right at this stage for a white male. Maybe someone from a different point of view, a different background, would be better for this role at this moment”.”
Intentionally or not, this could be seen as a response to erroneous news reports that Imtiaz Dharker had been offered the role of Poet Laureate. Dharker, a self-described “Pakistani Scottish Calvinist Muslim”, would have been the diverse choice for the position, and there is an argument that she would have spoken to a new generation of readers more effectively than a white heterosexual man.
Rupi Kaur, a 26-year old Canadian poet who has millions of followers on Instagram, wrote 2018’s bestselling collection, and the biggest buyers of poetry are women under the age of 34. (Armitage, incidentally, is no fan of Kaur, talking at his final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry of there being “too much applauding of the sentiment and not enough study of the approach”.) At a time when Kate Tempest has blurred the boundaries between poetry readings and gigs and when slam poetry is connecting in a visceral manner with young audiences in a way that traditional readings are not, the new Poet Laureate could be seen as a conservative choice: an unexpected rebuke to our ravenous age of progressive identity politics.
Or, alternatively, Armitage’s designation could be celebrated as giving a writer with a politically engaged and enquiring mind the most prominent of platforms from which to share his opinions. He has already promised to engage with climate change, describing it as “essential that poetry responds to that issue”, and asserting that “poetry is more valuable than ever before, in this confused and confusing place of over-information”. And his response to Gompertz’s impertinent enquiry was a sly masterpiece of pointed rebuke: “I come from an outside position. I have no formal education in English literature, and when I grew up in a terraced house on the side of a hill in West Yorkshire, I did not feel like ‘the chosen one’.”
He may now have joined the establishment, however reluctantly, and the end of his four-year tenure as Oxford Professor of Poetry saw him make his first public appearance since the Laureatship, which he wryly acknowledged with the comment that “my new job is attending to the poetic needs of 67.8 million people”. As he spoke with erudition and wit about “the problematic relationship between the specialist artist and the non-specialist audience”, and stating “poetry has to compete with museums, cinema, art galleries and the better TV shows” for attention, the lecture indicated Armitage’s engagement with poetry as a public, accessible art rather than something belonging to those in the ivory towers of academia. Yet there can be little doubt that Armitage’s enquiring, brilliant, irreverent and above all accessible writing means that, for the next decade, Britain will have at least one public figure that we can be proud of.