TS Eliot is voted Britain's favourite poet

Published on Thursday 8 October 2009 22:06

STAND aside contemporary poets … the Glasgow-born Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney were nowhere to be seen in a list of the nation's ten favourites unveiled yesterday.

TS Eliot was voted Britain's favourite poet, in a list dominated by dead white English males, in a poll to mark National Poetry Day.

Eliot's poem The Waste Land is seen as one of the greatest works of modern literature, with its many meanings that have inspired and infuriated generations of English literature students.

The Nobel Prize-winning writer, who died in 1965, reached a more popular audience with the witty rhymes in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats.

The BBC internet poll, which attracted 18,000 votes, saw Renaissance poet John Donne – famed for his romantic verse and who created much-used phrases such as "No man is an island" – come second.

But the surprise entry, at number three, was the Rastafarian writer Benjamin Zephaniah.

Born in Birmingham of Jamaican descent, Zephaniah, 51, left school aged 13 unable to read or write. The activist poet and novelist – who found fame through work about demonstrations and unemployment as well as poems for children – turned down an OBE in 2003.

Award-winning poet and writer David Harsent said yesterday: "It is an interesting first choice. I would have thought it would be Rudyard Kipling, or John Betjeman, or something more accessible.

"Given the fact that we are mired in a war that's gone on longer than the First or Second World Wars, you would have thought one of these war poets would have sprung to life."

The rest of the list comprised familiar names including Philip Larkin, William Blake, Dylan Thomas and John Keats.

Creative director of the BBC Alan Yentob said: "I have been an admirer of Eliot's poetry since I was a child … I was bowled over by one of his early poems The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.

"It's good to see that the classic texts still hold a strong place."