Sir – Julia Paolitto, for Oxford University (New university poet professor, June 24), may be right “that the controversy in last year’s election . . . had focused unprecedented attention” on that campaign.

Yet, since the French scholar and Fellow of Somerville, Dr. Enid Starkie (1897-1970), had busied herself with the elections of poet-professors C. Day Lewis in 1951, W.H. Auden in 1956, Robert Graves in 1961, and Edmund Blunden in 1966, the campaigns for the Professor of Poetry (POP) have been lively, perhaps best summed up by the Times’ description of the 1968 contest as a “combination of indirect Byzantine politics and the Grand National”.

Aspects of the 1966 and 1968 elections are worth recalling. In 1966, the multivocal American, Robert Lowell, should have been a shoo-in but was blocked at the eleventh hour by the Enid Starkie-Robert Graves-backed Edmund Blunden candidacy. A reluctant and ailing Blunden made the headlines when Richard Burton, in Oxford to play Marlowe’s Doktor Faustus in an OUDS production, which also featured Elizabeth Taylor as Helen, pledged his support.

Although Blunden was duly elected, in May 1968, he was forced through ill health to stand down after just two years of his five-year term, which led in the autumn of 1968 to one of the wildest and most newsworthy POP campaigns ever. Eleven candidates were nominated in a scramble of talents which included Roy Fuller, the Russian Yevgeny Yevtuschenko, the Argentinian Nobel-laureate-to-be Jorge Luis Borges, the critic Al Alvarez, poacher-turned-gamekeeper Enid Starkie, the fine Welsh language poet Caradog Prichard, and the 20-year old anarchist poet Barry MacSweeney.

In addition, a computer was nominated on the grounds that it had written stimulating poems and that the rules for nomination did not require a candidate to be human. On November 23, Roy Fuller was declared the official winner while Yevtushenko won a students’ election.

These lines by Geoffrey Hill, who was elected POP on June 18, might give pause for thought: “What we inherit from the fortunate/we have taken from the defeated” .

Bruce Ross-Smith Oxford