Seating a Poet

After centuries as the playing field of England's budding politicians, Oxford University understandably plays its own games of academic politics in mock-heroic earnest. Harold Macmillan twice won the prime-ministership by wider margins than his 1960 squeak into Oxford's chancellorship. "There's nothing most dons [professors] like better than a good bitchy election," observed the Sunday Times. Last week the bitchiest one in years had Oxford--and the nation --twittering as the port was passed.

It was much ado about little. The of fice at stake was Oxford's chair of poetry, which, as one commentator observed, offers "no power, little work and less money." Robert Graves, the retiring incumbent, picked up the annual $980 the professorship provides by delivering three lectures within eight weeks last year. Reason: for tax purposes, Graves is registered as a company in Liechtenstein and can only spend three months a year in Britain. Neither of this year's candidates--American Robert Lowell and Briton Edmund Blunden--bothered to campaign for the seat.

Red Underwear. Their backers, however, were fighting with a vengeance. Behind Lowell, the favorite at 6-4 and acknowledged the better poet of the two candidates, is Wadham College Warden Sir Maurice Bowra, who himself held the chair from 1946 to 1951. Bowra launched his campaign for Lowell last fall, after making, he claims, a gentleman's agreement with Blunden Backer Dr. Enid Starkie to limit the number of nominating signatures for each candidate. "She cheated me!" roared Bowra, when the flamboyant Miss Starkie, whose trademark is red underwear and a French sailor's hat, turned up with 301 names for Blunden to Bowra's 36 for Lowell. "She'll be standing on Magdalen Bridge selling rosettes next." Replied Starkie, who lectures in French: "I think a contest is fun. I love a battle." She admitted she had not read Poet Blunden's work "in years," adding that "nobody is interested in the best candidate--you back your fancy."

Although all 30,000-odd living holders of Oxford M.A. degrees are eligible to vote, ballots must be cast in person at Oxford. Last time, when Graves was elected, not quite 700 votes were cast since, in effect, it is largely the resident dons in Oxford who have a say in the outcome. After weeks of argument at "high tables" and public readings of both men's poetry, the M.A.s filed in their black gowns into the domed Sheldonian to cast their ballots. The sur prise winner at week's end--and Oxford poetry professor for the next five years: Edmund Blunden, with 477 votes v. 241 for Loser Lowell.

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