The Independent - London, April 25th, 1999
Any day now a new poet laureate will be appointed, so naturally the air is buzzing with contrasting views on the extent to which poets should be up with the news. On the whole, contemporary poetry is a private concern, tending to reflect on and celebrate an individual sensibility, and this does seem something of a narcissistic decline since the days when poets saw fit to narrate The Charge of the Light Brigade, say, or the blood-stained trenches of the Great War. But the finest modern poets - Derek Walcott and Tony Harrison, for instance - remain loyal to the classical position of the poet as ...
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