Poets at war

The New York Times has an article by John Burns about a tempest in a very small teapot:

A historic month for women in British poetry turned sour on Monday when the first woman in 301 years elected to Oxford University’s prestigious chair in poetry resigned and admitted what she had previously denied— that she had played a part in a covert effort to taint her main rival for the post with old allegations of sexual impropriety. Ruth Padel, 63, was chosen only ten days ago for the Oxford post, which is regarded as second only to poet laureate among the formal distinctions for poets in Britain. Two weeks earlier, Carol Ann Duffy, 53, became Britain’s first female poet laureate, a post formally created in 1668.
Ms. Padel’s admission that she sent email messages to two reporters last month alerting them to allegations of sexual harassment against her main rival for the Oxford post, the Nobel literature laureate Derek Walcott, was a stunning turn in a saga of skullduggery that had opened a bitter schism in Britain’s literary world.
Just as much, it has scandalized the ivy-walled cloisters of Oxford, exposing a culture of jealousy and mean-spirited connivance at sharp odds with the university’s public posture of academic tolerance and reason.
In a resignation statement released to the news media, Ms. Padel said that she had acted “as a result of student concern” about the allegations of sexual improprieties, and that the information she had cited was already in the public domain. “I acted in complete good faith and would have been happy to lose to Derek,” the statement said.
The battle for the post was a matter of prestige, not money. Chairs at Oxford and Cambridge rank their holders at the top of the academic hierarchy, and Ms. Padel’s predecessors have included literary giants like W. H. Auden and Robert Graves. But the chair draws a salary of barely $11,000 a year and requires nothing more of the holder than three public lectures a year.
During the campaign for the post, and after her election, Ms. Padel, a great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, insistently condemned the smear tactics that led Mr. Walcott, 79, to withdraw from a contest he had been favored to win. Mr. Walcott, born in St. Lucia, has spent much of the past thirty years commuting between his home on Trinidad and his teaching duties in the United States, and it was those duties that led to the allegations of sexual misconduct. Ms. Padel’s resignation came the day after two national newspapers, The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph, published articles detailing the email messages.
The two papers said that Ms. Padel had noted Mr. Walcott’s age, claimed that he was in poor health and pointed out that he lived in the Caribbean, not Britain. The Sunday Times quoted her as having gone on to say that “what he does for students can be found in a book called The Lecherous Professor, recording one of his two reported cases of sexual harassment.”
In the book, the authors, Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner, describe how Mr. Walcott was accused in 1982 of trying to seduce a student in his poetry class at Harvard, saying at one point: “Imagine me making love to you. What would I do?” According to the book, the student rebuffed the poet, and he gave her a C that was later changed to “pass” after the university reviewed the episode and reprimanded the poet.
Shortly after Ms. Padel’s messages were sent, an article outlining the allegations appeared in The Independent, a newspaper with a strong following among literati in Britain; within days, anonymous packages giving further details were mailed to dozens of Oxford academics who had the right to vote in the election.
The packages recapped the Harvard incident in photocopied passages from the book, along with details of an allegation by a Boston University student, Nicole Niemi, who claimed in a lawsuit that Mr. Walcott demanded in 1996 that she sleep with him as the price of his helping produce a play she had written. The case was settled out of court.
On 12 May, four days before the Oxford election, Mr. Walcott withdrew from the contest, saying it had “degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination”.
During what remained of the campaign, Ms. Padel denied having anything to do with the mailings, and condemned the attacks on Mr. Walcott, saying that she revered her rival and telling The New York Times in an interview published days before the vote that “it seems horrible, this anonymous campaign”.
After scoring an easy victory over the only other candidate, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, she told The Daily Telegraph her victory had been “poisoned by cowardly acts which I condemn and which I have nothing to do with.” She added, “Those acts have done immense damage to people and to poetry.”
But on Monday, bowing to demands for her resignation by a mounting list of influential literary and arts figures, including some who had vociferously backed her for the Oxford chair, Ms. Padel acknowledged her role in the campaign, saying she had sent the messages “naïvely and, with hindsight, unwisely.”
When Mr. Walcott quit the race, commentators in British newspapers noted the irony of hounding a distinguished literary figure on the basis of long-ago sexual transgressions when many of Britain’s greatest poets were social or political reprobates by the standards of modern-day Britain.
Michael Deacon in The Telegraph cited Lord Byron (“womanizer”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“drug fiend”), John Keats (“smackhead”), Rudyard Kipling (“imperialist”), T. S. Eliot (“lines that could be construed as racist”), and Dylan Thomas (“drank like a drain, begged and stole from friends”), among others, and concluded, “Not one of them, were they alive today, could hope to land the Oxford post— they just don’t meet the exacting moral standards set by people who conduct smear campaigns.”