{"id":84,"date":"2009-05-22T07:52:21","date_gmt":"2009-05-22T06:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=84"},"modified":"2010-04-07T22:38:32","modified_gmt":"2010-04-07T21:38:32","slug":"should-laureates-wear-cloaks-and-other-reasons-why-poetry-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=84","title":{"rendered":"Should Laureates wear cloaks? And other reasons why poetry matters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As a delightful footnote to yesterday&#8217;s post about Andrew Motion, I came across <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/culture\/2009\/may\/21\/last-nights-tv-apprentice\">Nancy Banks-Smith&#8217;s review<\/a> in the <em>Guardian<\/em> of Wednesday night&#8217;s <em>Why Poetry Matters<\/em> on BBC2. &#8216;Among the better bits was Andrew Motion&#8217;s abashed admission that he used to wear a cloak, feeling it was incumbent on a poet. His mother bought it for him.&#8217; So although yesterday&#8217;s poem showed the influence of the Georgian Brooke, Motion (bless him) already saw himself as a latter-day <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poetryarchive.org\/poetryarchive\/singlePoet.do?poetId=1569\">Tennyson<\/a>. Well, it did the trick: like his hero, Andrew eventually took the Laureate&#8217;s wreath as well as his cloak! <\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poetryarchive.org\/poetryarchive\/singlePoet.do?poetId=1569\">Poetry Archive site<\/a> has a recording of Tennyson reading &#8216;The Charge of the Light Brigade&#8217; in a wonderfully atmospheric wax-cylinder recording.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Andrew Motion and the poet&#8217;s cloak<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[22],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","tag-laureate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions\/158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}