Deprived of the hope of Seamus Heaney as poet laureate, English poetry got a consolation prize last night. Another Northern Irishman of similar vintage, Paul Muldoon, became professor of poetry at Oxford.
Muldoon, 47, was appointed unopposed to the five year post in succession to James Fenton after being the only candidate nominated to the university by the electoral deadline, 4pm yesterday. It was the first uncontested Oxford poetry election in living memory.
He follows WH Auden, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden in a starry line in a chair which is or used to be seen as a prime alternative to the poet laureateship.
A substantial poet who has also had warmly praised opera librettos performed in the United States, where he works and lives with his family, he said after hearing the result: 'I am thrilled but daunted also, because I realise I have to come up with some wonderful lectures.'
The way Muldoon was chosen is something of a throwback to 1930s and 1940s Oxford when dons some not even from the English faculty were drafted unopposed into the chair as the crowning glory of a lifetime of prose.
In the 1950s WH Auden broke this tradition through his intense popularity with students.
His successor Cecil Day-Lewis beat off a gaggle of dons, establishing the rule that the professor had to be a working poet of merit.
In the mid-1960s a group of All Souls fellows tried by a blitz of nominations to ensure that the American poet Robert Lowell was chosen.
But Blunden, nominated at the last minute, won easily with mass support from Oxford graduates in the outside world all of whom are entitled to vote.
That turned poetry elections into hard-fought hustings with multiple candidates in the 1970s and early 1980s. But hurt feelings and disappointment, for good poets who lacked publicity flair, grew so acute that campaigning has more recently quietened down.
Muldoon's choice was masterminded by his friend and fellow poet Tom Paulin, a Hertford college don. Paulin, a frequent broadcaster, is not unskilled at publicity and controversy.
He fought a shrewdly quiet campaign, avoiding the lime light and mustering 49 early nominations, some from heads of colleges. It was a respectable tally but not huge by the yardstick of some previous elections.
With the national spotlight on Ted Hughes's unexpected death and the scramble for his post, the result was that the Oxford vacancy went almost unnoticed.
'I was a bit surprised that no one else stood,' Muldoon said last night, 'Why that was I really can't say.'
However, it is recognised that he would have stood a good chance in a contested poll and that Oxford's change of style may prove a good way of choosing a professor whose job is to lecture three times a year for a £4,695 salary.
Born into a Catholic background in Portadown, Muldoon is the son of a teacher and a labourer. He went to Queen's university, Belfast, where his tutor was Seamus Heaney, and worked as a reporter and producer at BBC Belfast.
His prizes include the Geoffrey Faber, TS Eliot and American academy of arts and letters awards. He is the president of the Poetry Society in Britain.
Recently an American critic wrote of one of his operas, 'Muldoon's libretto is one of the few one may actually want to take home and study as literature.'
