No rhyme or reason for age limit on Oxford poetry professorship | Letters

Having recently put myself forward as a potential candidate for the forthcoming Oxford poetry professorship election, I am gobsmacked to discover that this venerable university has pulled a drawbridge up against anyone older than 69 qualifying for such a long-memoried position. Applying conventional retirement rules to a four- to five-year job feels like a retrograde step on the part of Oxford. Such discrimination is particularly inimical to the roles poetry and poets play in society.

Poets tend to resist institutionalisation and rarely if ever retire. Good poetry itself is, as Ezra Pound declared, “news that stays news”. To rule out the potential contributions of numerous older poets who may want to apply in years to come, at a point in life when they will be likely to have achieved a considerable knowledge of poetic arts and crafts, seems not just unfair, but wilfully to defy administrative logic.