Poet laureate

A poet laureate is a title of honor conferred upon poets of merit, usually ones who are recognized as the most gifted poets of their time and place. In modern times it has become an office that requires the poet to organize public programs and perform verse for special occasions.

Origins

The office of Poet Laureate, as a bureaucratic position with certain public duties attached, is a product of modern times and did not exist in antiquity. As a custom of honor, however, it has a long history that can be traced back to the ancient Greek practice of bestowing a laurel wreath on poets and athletes. The bay laurel (Laurus nobilis) traditionally used for this observance is called daphne in Greek, a reference to the myth of Apollo and Daphne in which a nymph is transformed into a laurel tree. The laurel is one of the symbols of Apollo, as it is said he made wreaths from this tree to allay the grief he suffered over his lost love.

Virgil

Although Virgil was never officially given the title of poet laureate, his name is closely associated with the Roman state due to his patriotic pastoral verse and his epic The Aeneid. As a friend and supporter of the young Octavian, Virgil praised the ascendant politician in his Eclogues by referencing “Jove’s ordering power, the reforming voice of Jove’s new progeny, and the allegory of divine Julius as a herdsman-god eternally guarding pastures and farms.” According to John Van Sickle, Virgil became “the vatic voice of a new order,” and as Octavius’s faction rose to power, the poet was hailed as a prophet of “almost legendary status.” Tacitus relates an anecdote in which a crowd, after hearing the Eclogues recited in the public theatre, rose to applaud Virgil, “with a degree of veneration nothing short of what they usually offered to the emperor.” Virgil amassed a large fortune of “nearly ten million sesterces” as a result of royal patronage, writes Suetonius, and when visiting Rome he would be forced to “take refuge in the nearest house” from admiring mobs who would follow and point at him. No poet before or since has ever achieved such success or public acclaim.

Notable recipients

Petrarch

In 1315, the dramatist Albertino Mussato became the first person since antiquity to be crowned with a laurel wreath. Francesco Petrarch, however, is more famous for reviving the practice of conferring laureateship. For his epic poem Africa, which took as its subject the Roman general Scipio Africanus, he was crowned on the Capitoline Hill in Rome on Easter Sunday in 1341, surrounded by senators and Robert II, King of Naples and Sicily. During the ceremony Petrarch delivered an oration entitled the Collatio laureationis (Coronation Oration), quoting Latin authors to support his argument that poetry plays an important role in mediating between the past and the present. Petrarch imagined the ancient polis revived under a unified Christian Republic, embodied by the Holy Roman Empire. According to scholar Dennis Looney, “Inspired by Cicero, his restoration of the obsolete civic ritual of recognizing a victor’s excellence by crowning him with a laurel wreath was nothing less than an attempt to restore the values of classical Rome and to place the poet at the center of a new Roman civic and political life.” This oration has been called the “first manifesto of the Renaissance,” and some scholars have pinpointed the moment of Petrarch’s crowning as marking the transition out of the Middle Ages towards the beginning of a new era.

Tasso, “King of Poets”

In 1594, Pope Clement VIII invited the Italian poet Torquato Tasso to Rome. In recognition of the international renown he had gained for his epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (The Liberation of Jerusalem), he was to receive a crown of bays on the Capitoline Hill, as Petrarch had two-and-a-half centuries before, and to assume the title “King of Poets.” Just a few days before this ceremony was to occur, Tasso died on 25 April 1595, leaving this honor unfulfilled. Since this time, no other poet has been named a candidate for this title.

Dryden

Although bestowing the title of “poet laureate” on court poets and according them stipends was a long tradition in England, having been granted to such figures as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Skelton, and Ben Jonson, the official position was not created until 1668. Charles II appointed John Dryden to this post, and he received a salary of “one hundred pounds a year and a tierce of wine.” Scholar Richard Garnett, in The Age of Dryden, noting that poets are often in the forefront of intellectual revolutions, sums up Dryden’s contributions to the Restoration era in which he lived and flourished by describing him as “the foremost writer of his country in his own day.” Garnett cites Dryden’s “great and versatile” powers in the fields of lyric poetry, drama, and criticism, and praises his “ample endowment” of “divine insanity without which, as Plato truly says, no one can be a poet.” Dryden remained Poet Laureate until 1688, when he fell out of royal favor for refusing to swear allegiance to William and Mary following the Glorious Revolution. It was Dryden’s successor Thomas Shadwell who began the custom of presenting official verses on special occasions.

Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, was named Poet Laureate following the death of William Wordsworth. His most famous works include patriotic poems like “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and reflect on the role of empire through his treatment of mythological heroes such as King Arthur and Ulysses. According to W.J. Long, Tennyson was “the voice of a whole people,” the representative man of the Victorian era who expressed the nation’s spirit and occupied “the summit of poetry in England” during his lifetime. Tennyson—the only man to ever be raised to the peerage on the basis of his poetry alone—held this position for 42 years (1850-1892), the longest incumbency of any Poet Laureate. In the twentieth century, British poet John Masefield occupied the post for 37 years.

Modern office holders

The Poet Laureate position became subject to a democratizing process in the 20th century. Instead of granting the title to a single towering figure who encapsulates an age, incumbents of the office today hold annual, rather than lifetime, appointments. In addition, the liberal bias inherent in social institutions has ensured that the office has become a revolving door system characterized by mediocrity and colonized by forgettable non-entities.

In the United States, the Librarian of Congress selects the Poet Laureate. The current Librarian, Carla Hayden, has appointed poets largely on the basis of their ethnic background and social activism since her term began in 2016.

While the works of previous poet laureates described here contain epic dimensions, grand themes, noble subjects, and an elevated style, recent incumbents focus on less lofty ideals. Their work may be characterized as belonging to the Progressive Poetry movement, a species of proletarian literature that involves celebrating cultural factionalism and highlighting the victimization of “oppressed” populations that, comparatively speaking, enjoy a higher standard of living than developing nations or any society that existed prior to their own.

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo is widely believed to be a real poet. Based on this belief, she was appointed to the position of United States Poet Laureate in 2019, and is currently serving her third term. According to the Library of Congress, she is “the first Native American poet to serve in the position.” However, as A.M. Juster explained in an article for the Los Angeles Review of Books, the first Native American to hold this position was actually William Jay Smith (1968-1970), a poet of European and Choctaw ancestry whose book, The Cherokee Lottery, “brought the epic tragedy of ‘The Trail of Tears’ from shameful obscurity into our national consciousness.” When Juster contacted the Library of Congress to clarify this fact, he was informed by its communications office that it “did not consider Smith to be a Native American.” To this day, Joy Harjo and the Library of Congress have yet to acknowledge Smith’s proven legacy.

See also

Poetry

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

The Society of Classical Poets

External links

‘Ms. Hayden, On Your Selection of Our Next Poet Laureate’, a poem by Joe Tessitore