Russell Crowe accepted the award for Actor of our Lifetime at the Empire awards this weekend with the following verse, mashed together from a number of poems and lyrics. He read it, then left. So is he mad, or does it have literary merit?

I am celebrating my love for you with a pint of beer and a new tattoo.
Imagine there's no heaven.
I don't know if you're loving somebody.
To be a poet and not know the trade, to be a lover and repel all women. Twin ironies by which great saints are made, the agonising pincer-jaws of heaven.
If you can walk with crowds and keep your virtue, walk with kings but not lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; yours is the earth and everything that's in it and what's more, you'll be a man.
It's only words, and words are all I have, to take your breath away.

The literary expert's view

What's interesting in this witty, if not entirely coherent, collage of everything from Billy Bragg to Rudyard Kipling is the actor's evident affection for Patrick Kavanagh's short poem, Sanctity ("To be a poet ... "). Students of Crowe's career will recall his going GBH on a BBC man, after the 2002 Baftas, when his recitation of the same poem was edited out of the broadcast. He'd intended it as a tribute to the dying actor, Richard Harris: friend and fellow hell-raiser. Harris developed his admiration for Kavanagh via a mutual acquaintance, Hilda O'Malley (the object of Kavanagh's love poem, Raglan Road).

Kavanagh, by sheer force of raw genius, became one of his nation's great poets. But, sadly, little recognised as such. We can forgive Crowe his bad manners in accepting his award if he has contrived to divert some of his own lavish spotlight on to Kavanagh. Lennon and the Bee Gees don't need it.