I can't remember how I stumbled upon it now but I have been reading James Fenton's collected lectures from his time as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in the late 1990's, The Strength of Poetry.
They are tremendous. Prof. Fenton having been an Auden man, Auden is allocated the most attention, and clear, insightful attention it is, as well as a strong cast of largely 'usual suspects', like Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia and some pertinent points which might shed some light on why we don't hear so much about D.H. Lawrence these days.
Previous incumbents of the Oxford chair, like Heaney and Paul Muldoon, have delivered books in the same league as this and I know Simon Armitage's are avaailable to listen to somewhere on the wires where he puts up a good performance, trying to live up to the rarified standard, with a very throuogh close reading of Tamer and Hawk.
It might have seemed that Prof. Armitage succeeded to the post because there wasn't anybody else comparable to those august predessors but we will see. I have had him as odds-on to be the next Poet Laureate ever since Ms. Duffy was appointed and yet I saw a name mentioned in the paper recently that I had never even heard of which could mean it's a wide-open inclusive culture, could mean I'm not keeping up with what is trending or could mean their publicity machine is doing a good job.
I write only to draw attention to the Fenton book, could quote it and tell you but would rather you decide for yourself but, like other top, top books, like Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened Of, his reflections on mortality written when he was only a couple of years older than I am now, it succedds by telling you what you knew already but puts it much better and with more telling quotes and examples than one knew.
But one also wonders what one might talk about if one took the job, one lecture a term for four years = 12. In that unlikely event.
There are no rules. Each poem succeeds or fails on its own terms. So it is perfectly reasonable to assume it's possible to have a morally didactic, virtue-signalling poem and read it out loud it in the precious, intense voice of someone like Ocean Vuong.
It becomes more difficult to appreciate the work of generations that come after you as much as you did the generations that came before you. Those that come after you seem to have stolen the game and decided to play it differently whereas those before, those that you admired, were those you learned from. And even if one does keep up with the latest fashions, one starts to look like John Peel, having previously championed Tyrannosaurus Rex, then Tangerine Dream and then The Fall, he contiuned to promote music by artists young enough to be his grandchildren. It's as if he had no point of view.
All poems come from other poems even if that is only the poet's idea of what a poem is and which they have read and so there is nothing wrong with being derivative. While it is possible that there might be potential genius in remote places, it isn't going to be realized if they don't know what a poem is. Art is recreational, which I still want to believe means it wants to recreate something a bit like something else it has seen and admired.
Yes, Larkin was politically incorrect. Even I, defending him as best I could whenever possible, had to give up when he said in a letter he didn't see why the anti-Apartheid campaign should ruin his cricket. Important though cricket, and poetry, sometimes is, it's not that important. But none of that detracts from his poetry because poetry is the words, not the person that wrote them.
And, even if it seems late in the day, it may not be too late to re-assert the credentials of Thom Gunn as the major English language poet of his generation. Maybe he suffered from becoming 'trans-Atlantic', still an English poet in San Francisco; maybe his work is 'uneven', but if not as consistent as Larkin, way ahead of the machismo and myth-making that Ted Hughes descended into, but for the sense, the parallel contemporary and long historical contexts of the poems and being virtuosic in moving from and between metred, syllabic and free verse which, it would be nice to think, any poet would do.
Etc, etc.
So, maybe I could do it. But I'd rather not.