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Only the Queen's Poetry, Please

by Zoe Strimpel
Sun, 13 Apr 2008

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Uh-oh. Postmodernists — or just moderns — have been caught out. The Queen's English Society, whose heroes include Chaucer, John Donne, and Shakespeare, has launched a campaign against the kind of poetry that is, well, more like a chaotic assembly of prose than a Shakespearean sonnet. Basically, the sort that most of us read if we read poetry at all, and often the type Transport for London puts on Tube trains to keep the commuter's mind alive.

Unsurprisingly for an organization with a name like this one, the Society is strict and traditional in its definition of what constitutes poetry. Even Poet Laureate Andrew Motion doesn't cut the mustard with his poem "The Golden Rule," written to mark the queen's 80th birthday, since it lacks strict meter and rhyme. Michael George Gibson, of the Society, was quoted in the Observer with an explanation of the campaign that even the English dons of Oxbridge might find overly prim and restrictive. "For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure and, second, alliteration and rhyme," he said. "Word-things not made according to those principles are not poems."

Long live the queen. And her English.

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