The poet Craig Raine is no stranger to the sexually risqué - his very first collection, The Onion, Memory, famously quoted the morning-after fantasy of the lascivious butler who Henry Green said had inspired his novel Loving. The borrowed line, in Raine’s poem Bed & Breakfast, involved smelly fingers and buttered toast, and - combined with the image “five pink farrow suckle at each foot” - prompted reviewer Gavin Ewart to reflect: “When the Metaphysicals went too far, weren’t they a bit like this?”

But Bed & Breakfast was published in the days before Twitter, where Raine’s latest poem, printed in this week’s issue of the LRB, has unleashed a stream of parodies and seen him trending alongside Andy Coulson and Rafael Benitez.

The poem, which is called Gatwick, is a fantasy about a young official at passport control. “She is maybe 22 / like a snake in a zoo,” writes Raine “I want / to give her a kiss / But I can’t... I want to say I like your big bust. Which you try to disguise with a scarf.”

He wistfully concludes: “I can say these things, I say, because I’m a poet and getting old. / But of course, I can’t / and I won’t”.

After today’s backlash the 70-year-old poet and novelist might be feeling he shouldn’t and wishing he hadn’t.

He did, however, have one high profile supporter in the poet and novelist Sophie Hannah, who tweeted:

And his case was quickly taken up by Spectator columnist Steerpike, who asked “Can Twitter not cope with a slightly fruity poem?”